Hearing Voices
by dedletrbox
Summary: math can make you crazy [complete]
1. Default Chapter

A/N: First-time Numb3rs fanfic--I got hooked halfway through the season, haven't even seen all the episodes, so please R&R if there are any major oversights.

The front door was unlocked and there was no car in the driveway. Don stood in the foyer for nearly a minute after the screen door had slammed behind him, leaning against the wall and willing away the eyestrain from a day spent in required "enrichment seminars." He played idly with the broken deadbolt, which had been hanging by one screw since he and his father had whacked it moving the hospital bed out of the house after his mother's death. The rental company said their guys would move it, but Alan just could not tolerate having it in the house for one more day. The bolt had been hanging there, half-on, half-off, ever since. Don listened to the sound of the summer evening settling into dusk and ran his fingers over the holes where the missing screws had held everything together. Summer had always been his mother's favorite time of year, and this winding-down hour of late afternoon had been her favorite time of any summer day.

She was worse than either of her sons for counting the days until summer vacation and then frittering them away with half-finished projects and days at the beach. Conversely, Dad was always busiest during the summer, when the long days made for numerous construction projects, each somehow in defiance of its planning ordinance. Alan often wouldn't get home until it was dark. Mom would call a halt to all summer activities around 6 o'clock, though, summoning Don home from Little League or scouts or swim practice and rousting Charlie from his only summer activity, math. The three of them would eat dinner and then move out to the solarium or the back yard with glasses of lemonade, which she made with maraschino cherries and wedges of lime. God, Don had thought that was the most sophisticated thing until he'd gotten to New York and someone…some Manhattanite blind date… had explained it was a Betty Crocker recipe too old to even be considered retro. Amanda was the girl's name, he remembered, and she'd gone on for ten solid minutes about all the artificial coloring and hydrogenated sugars contained in bottled cherries. He hadn't seen much of her after that one date and the lemonade had never tasted quite the same.

He was wondering if his mother had changed the recipe—if there had ever _been_ a recipe, since Mom was inclined to make things up as she went—when he heard a splash from the kitchen.

"Charlie? Hey, buddy…" Don hauled himself off the wall and made his way toward the back of the house, working off his tie, rolling up his sleeves. "You back here? Charlie?"

His younger brother _was_ in the kitchen, but might as well have been on another planet. He was standing at the counter, alternately stirring a pitcher of juice and grading a stack of papers. The papers must be math, because they were getting the lion's share of Charlie's attention. He had a marking pen in his right hand (and another, forgotten, in the back pocket of his cargo shorts and a third tucked behind his ear) and his left arm was extended across the counter so that he could occasionally slosh the contents of the pitcher with a wooden spoon. The sloshing was purely a reflexive spasm because he'd obviously forgotten completely about the kitchen. He looked up once, staring straight at the partial reflection Don cast in the kitchen window, then went right back to his papers.

"Without affect," Don thought, reminded of today's presentation on characteristics of psychopaths. He watched his brother's dark head bent over the notes. He could picture his twelve-year-old self giving a play-by-play account of that day's little league game, his mother drinking lemonade and working her fingers through Charlie's curls as they listened, could see it as clearly as his own reflection in the darkening window. He wasn't really thinking straight, punch-drunk on the half-light and the heat and the sudden silence after a day in conferences and seminars; that was honestly his only reason for what he did next.


	2. absentminded professor

It was a maneuver taught at Quantico, where they choreograph these things like ballets. The intent was to disarm a left-handed suspect who was unaware of the agent behind him. Charlie would doubtlessly say that the likelihood of meeting all those requirements was statistically insignificant. Nevertheless, the FBI, like Don's old Boy Scout troop, liked to be prepared for every eventuality. And this was about as perfect an opportunity as Don would ever get: rarely did you find anyone with a gun—anyone with a _pulse_—who was as distracted as Charlie was when he was working on a problem. Don shucked off his shoes and eased into the kitchen on silent stockingfeet. Ideally, he heard his old instructor explain, the agent would be able to clap on hand on the suspect's dominant wrist and another on the left shoulderblade. By pushing the shoulder forward before the suspect could react, the agent could simultaneously secure the weapon and break the suspect's hold on it, while keeping himself out of reach. Some of Don's fellow trainees had improved on the basic model by kicking the suspect's feet out from under him, but Don personally thought that was a great way to get yourself shot in the scuffle or slapped with a lawsuit later on. Moreover, Charlie was close enough to the kitchen counter that he might crack his head on the way down.

As if a distracted, gunwielding southpaw were not rare enough, the tactic was also prescribed for agents who had somehow lost their service revolvers—both because it was pretty desperate and because an agile target could conceivably grab the agent's holster with his non-dominant hand. No worries there, Don knew; handing a weapon was perhaps the only skill other than driving that Charlie had difficulty acquiring.

He took a wide stance, rocking up onto the balls of his feet to make the most the few inches he had on his brother. It worked like a charm, at first: left hand on left hand—right hand on left shoulder. Charlie, shaken from his math, let out such a squawk of surprise that Don started laughing. _This_ would teach him to lock the door when he was at home alone! But he'd underestimated his little brother's tensile strength and forgotten that there was no weapon, just a long wooden spoon. Jumping back from the counter, Charlie knocked over the stack of papers. The spoon caught on the lip of the pitcher and that went over too. Don's socks slipped on the tile floor and he ended up on the ground, in a puddle, beneath a layer of paper.

"Don," Charlie sounded alarmed, "Are you OK? You just startled me…I was…now you're all wet!" He looked so ridiculously contrite, standing their waving that spoon that Don started laughing all over again.

"I was sneaking up on _you_ genius!" he said. "_You_ should be on the floor in a puddle of…is this lemonade?" Don picked himself up and shook off the damp papers that stuck to his wet shirt.

Charlie smiled uncertainly, still not quite sure what had happened, but glad that Don wasn't mad. "Maybe next time I should be the secret agent and you should be the absent-minded professor."

Don looked at the paper in his hand: at least a third of it appeared to be in Greek. "Uhmm, maybe not. What is this?"

"The latest chapter of Amita's thesis." Charlie said. Now it was Don's turn to feel guilty. "Don't worry," Charlie reassured him, "it's a draft. I bet she'll be more than happy to provide another copy once I explain that the original was lost in a hostile raid on my kitchen."

Don sent Charlie off to call Amita and started cleaning up the mess—he really did feel bad about damaging her thesis; this kind restlessness was exactly why he shouldn't be expected to sit in conferences all day. He managed to salvage a stack of notebooks that had been only slightly splashed, but Charlie said they were useless. Don looked at him, eyebrows raised; he'd never heard Charlie dismiss _any_ math as useless.

"One of Carol Bressard's students keeps handing them in," Charlie paused on his way to the phone, "but they just…they're totally incoherant." He sounded frustrated by his inability to explain just how senseless the notations were. "She wanted me to look at them, as an outside opinion, 'cause this kid gets really upset when she disagrees with him. But I'm going to have to tell her not to OK the project unless he can come up with something better. I mean, compared with Amita, this—" Charlie flipped open a notebook to get the student's name "Anthony Padgett—he's is just in his own world, with his own mathematical rules."

Collecting pages off the floor, Don couldn't make heads or tails of Amita's work either, but he knew enough to see it was much more professional. Typed, for instance, instead of handwritten in various inks. Amita's work had headings and footnotes and page numbers, all the little details you add to research when you have other people in mind. Flipping through Padgett's notebook was like being inside Padgett's head: random thoughts in no particular order, written vertically, crossing margins, often breaking off in the middle of a page with no consideration toward the reader.

"Maybe you should tell that colleague to have Padgett talk to someone," Don suggested when Charlie wandered into the kitchen again.

"Carol can barely get him to talk to _her_," Charlie said as he pulled some limes from the fridge. "She thought bringing me in would help, but I didn't have much more luck. Anthony insists that we're just not seeing the obvious, but he doesn't want to go into details, lest we, I don't know, publish something earthshaking before he does." He seemed to sense Don watching him and turned around. "Oh," he said finally, "that kind of talk."

"I'm sure he's a very bright guy, but a doctoral student this out of touch with the basics of writing might need more than just an extension," Don said. Even Charlie, whose ideas were abstruse and whose rough drafts were frequently written on paper napkins, wouldn't dream of handing in something so disorganized. The academic niceties were second nature by the time grad school rolled around. "You know, a lot of undiagnosed schizophrenics have very high IQs, according to the profiler we had today. Something like seventy percent."

The numbers piqued Charlie's attention, as Don knew they would. "Seventy is high," the mathematician said, "but, then, you have to consider the definition of "high" intelligence. IQ is re-normed every year or so. If you didn't adjust the numbers, there would probably still be a 3 percent jump. Of that 3, only about—"

"I'm just saying," Don interrupted, **"**a lot of smart people can also be kind of unstable and sometimes it's hard to tell. Remember the economics guy from that movie? The one who won a Nobel prize? He said he believed the voices that told him about Communist plots because those same voices were right when they talked about economics."

"John Nash was a mathematician," Charlie corrected, "He won a Nobel for economics only because the Nobel Prize committee doesn't _have_ a math award." He sounded personally offended that the Queen of the Sciences had been slighted by Stockholm: Larry teased him about it every year when the prizes were handed out. Don knew more about Nash was revealed in the movie—the profiler had gone into great detail—he just hadn't wanted to directly insult one of Charlie's applied math heroes; instead he'd brought up a point of constant contention. Smooth move. Charlie turned back to the cutting board, "Honestly, I think this Anthony is probably just stressed out, up against deadlines. He has to turn in something or forfeit his summer research stipend….Hey, you should go take a shower before that lemonade dries."

Don decided not to comment on the clumsy segue and wandered out to get the change of clothes he kept in his car. He was particularly careful to lock the front door firmly behind him. He'd heard it swing open and then slam while he was in the kitchen with Charlie; it really was time to fix that dead bolt. He was halfway to the bathroom when something caught his mind's eye.

"Charlie!" He yelled down the steps. He saw his brother's curly head stick through the kitchen doorway. "Did you…were you…Did I just see you _counting _those cherries?"

"The proportions are important," Charlie called back, sounding defensive. "Too many cherries and it's too sweet, too many limes and…oh, just go take your shower!"


	3. correlation

There was a new batch of lemonade by the time Don got out of the shower, and Charlie was taking the pitcher and glasses out to the garage. Neither of them mentioned the solarium. 

"Did I hear the phone ringing?"

"Yeah, several times."

Don waited for Charlie to realize he wanted more information.

"Uhhh, once was Dad, calling to say he's going to stay with Aunt Jean. Apparently that quick-fix to her water heater wasn't so quick. And a few were wrong numbers to my cellphone."

Don had been hoping that Terry would call about her presentation. Not that he was holding his breath or anything.

"There are some cookies from Amita in that plastic container of the fridge," Charlie called over his shoulder.

Don snagged the cookies and followed him to the garage. "Amita made you cookies?"

The surprise in his voice made Charlie self-conscious and he dropped behind his desk to plug in an electric fan. "She didn't make cookies _for me_," he amended. "She made cookies. And I couldn't just leave them at school."

"Oh, no?" Don said innocently, swallowing a cookie.

"I'd never get rid of Larry if he found out I kept cookies in my office."

That made Don laugh and Charlie was glad to see him relax a little.

"If you're turning your investigative powers on me," he said "can I assume nothing much happened at work?"

Don took the glass Charlie was offering and propped his feet up on a stack of textbooks. "Mental Health Enrichment Seminars," he sighed, "What to do if your suspect turns out to be psychotic, instead of just plain crazy like most of the people who tangle with the FBI. Is it wrong to hope that a major financial fraud case is discovered before the end of the week?"

"No worse than _planning_ major financial fraud while sitting in faculty meetings," Charlie offered. "Honestly, if the faculty senate doesn't come to a conclusion on plus/minus grading pretty soon, I going to develop designs on the stock market." He paused when he caught Don's eyes. "That's a joke, Don. I'm kidding. I couldn't…that is…I would never…well, just forget it."

Don tried to make his face blank. He hadn't meant to look surprised, or accusing, or however he'd looked. He just couldn't turn his mind off after the day's lectures.

"So, uhm, Terry gives a presentation tomorrow," he said at last, just to break the silence. "She won't tell me what it's about. Only that it's 'interactive.'"

"Crime rates are supposed to go _up_ in the summer," Charlie mused, refusing to comment on the seminars, "Ice cream-Rape Theorum and all that. Maybe you should enjoy the break while you've got it."

Don choked on his lemonade, spitting a cherry onto the floor of the garage. "Did you just say 'Ice cream–_rape_ theorum?"

"Yeah—there's a statistical correlation between the number of rapes reported and the revenue of ice cream vendors in the LA County area. When one goes up, so does the other. I call it the Ice-Cream-Rape Theorum when I teach my intro classes."

"But that doesn't make any sense. There's nothing to link ice cream with rape."

Charlie raised his eyebrows, looking supremely innocent. "Obviously there _is_ a link, otherwise, why such a close correlation? It's held consistent for years."

Don could see his brother smiling behind his lemonade glass. "Ok, Charlie, give me a hint."

"Well," Charlie reached for a cookie. "All I said was correlation. I didn't say it was causative."

Don thought about that one. "So something else is causing the rapes, other than the purchase of ice cream? Of course it is! Because ice cream has _nothing_ _to do with anything_."

"No, no," Charlie relented in the face of Don's annoyance. "Think about it the other way around. Not what causes the crime, what causes ice cream consumption. Why would people buy ice cream from a street vendor?"

"Uhm—because they like ice cream?"

Charlie just looked at him, so Don kept guessing. "Because it's warm outside?"

"Right. It's summer, people are wandering around, tourists…"

"Maybe in neighborhoods they don't know really well, later in the evenings 'cause it's still light," continued Don, "Just having a good time…not really thinking about safety…"

"Not exactly wearing winter coats and mittens," Charlie threw in.

"So, the increased number of people buying ice cream and the jump in reported rapes are unrelated results of the same cause?"

"Exactly," Charlie smiled, "And that cause is…"

"Summertime," Don concluded.

"I use it every year, just about, to teach my students that context is what makes numbers meaningful. Take them out of context and you can make them say anything, even the wrong thing. For instance, there's—"

"Charlie," Don interrupted, "do you hear voices?"

Charlie stopped for a minute, confused, "No. Dad's not coming home tonight, remember, he's going to drive back tomorrow. We're the only ones here."


	4. mend

"No," Don explained awkwardly, "I mean, when you're doing math. Are there, uhm, math voices, you know, telling you things?"

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Don wanted to bite his tongue. It was too dark to see Charlie clearly, but he could practically feel his brother tense up.

When they were younger, he used to think that Charlie was incapable of taking offense, of being angry with anyone. There was a three-year stretch when he'd refused to take Charlie to movies because the kid just didn't seem to understand even PG jealousies and aggravations. "Why is he yelling?" he'd ask, tugging on Don's sleeve, looking up with big, dark eyes that reflected the light from the screen. "Why is she so upset? Doesn't she know it will turn out OK?" Don would explain that it was just pretend, but that confused Charlie even more: "Why would they pretend _not _to like each other?" As though the characters were real people, as though Don had all the answers in the world.

In fact, when the presenter today had explained how psychopaths were often unable to understand other people's motivations or to comprehend that others saw the world differently, Don had immediately thought of Charlie. And then he'd felt guilty, because he knew now that Charlie _did_ get angry, furious sometimes—he just usually took it out on himself. With other people, he became frustrated. Like now.

Charlie leaned back in his chair, resting his head on the back, setting his lemonade glass down on the floor. Being deliberately calm. Don couldn't make out his expression in the evening light, and he suddenly remembered the little boy in the dark movie theater.

"I'm a mathematician, Don" Charlie said quietly, "not a magician, not a medium. I find numbers to suit patterns that really do exist; I don't make up any of it. You—and David, and Terry and even Dad—like to joke about my crazy equations. They're not crazy, and neither am I. The equations are fact, they're science, they're a lot more accurate than FBI profiling. Maybe how I work seems strange to you, but I don't go into trances and just come up with answers from thin air. I look at the data and work it out. And I do mean _work_. No voices, Don; not about math or Communist spies or whatever it is you're really asking about."

Charlie catapulted himself out of his chair and towards the door, not looking at Don, but talking louder and faster now. "You still don't think it's possible that I know things, understand things, that you don't. There has to be another reason, right? Something other than my just being better than you are at something. But how you can sit there, in this room, and act like these numbers aren't real—aren't everywhere—that's just beyond me, Don. Are you as good at reading evidence as people say you are?" He tapped notebooks and textbooks and chalkboards as he walked across the garage and right out the door.

Don thought about going after his brother, but somehow all his nervous energy had evaporated. God, he was tired all of a sudden. With Charlie, even simple things were exhausting; Don felt like they spoke different languages and missed a lot in translation. They'd been getting along, solving that ice cream thing together—ok, so Don had needed help and Charlie had already known the answer, but still…and then Don had to open his big mouth.

What was wrong with him? With them? Other people got along perfectly well with their adult siblings. Terry, for instance, had shuttled between divorced parents as a kid and then been posted all over the country as an agent, but you'd never know it. When she and her sister got together it was like the Favorite College Roommate All-Girl Reunion Tour: girly and grown-up at the same time. She and Caroline went shopping and ate out every night; they went dancing and drinking and took day-trips to the beach where they gossiped about work and men. (And probably, Don thought, men at work: he'd only met Caroline Lake once, but she'd seemed to know an awful lot about him). David not only ate dinner with his sister and her children at least once a week, he actually turned off his cellphone while he was there. "Uncle Dave is in great demand as a babysitter. He tells kickass bedtime stories," David had said, proudly. "Uhm, not that he uses words like that; Linda would wash my mouth out with soap!"

"Wait, is this the sister whose husband you don't like?" Don had asked, surprised.

David shrugged. "Yeah, Jim and I, we don't always see eye to eye. Lynn says the word, I'll knock him into next week," he said simply, "but she's a big girl, I trust her to take care of herself."

That's what they needed: a little more trust. And a little less of the competitive hothouse atmosphere they'd grown up with, where Charlie wanted to prove he could keep up with Don, and Don wanted to make the point that he was too cool to even be in the same league. He should have gotten over that "who wants to be a math genius, anyway?" stage by now. Instead he was still saying thoughtless things, not taking Charlie seriously. No. No, Don reigned himself in: he was _not_ taking all the blame for this one. If Charlie couldn't understand concern, even when it was badly phrased, well, whose fault was that?

It wasn't anyone's fault, really, and it wasn't intentional. They just _misunderstood_ each other, constantly, at a fundamental level. Charlie had been joking about the stock market and not joking about Larry and the cookies; Don hadn't gotten that. What else had he read wrong? Don had offended Charlie and wasn't quite sure if he deserved the reaction he'd gotten. It was like he'd said something horribly rude in Japanese when he'd only meant to ask for directions. Maybe it had nothing to do with him: perhaps Charlie was jealous of Anthony Padgett, maybe was more upset than he'd seemed about that stunt in the kitchen. It didn't matter what the real reason was, because like that stupid theorem, Don would never figure it out on his own.

Don collected the glasses and what was left of the cookies and walked back into the house. Terry had told him once—a long time ago now, back when they were in school—that love had no biological basis. You don't love your siblings because of some genetic compatibility, you love them because you knew each other so well and shared so much. In other words, for the same reason that you liked your friends, only more so, Terry had explained, because family has a home-court advantage: they know you better and share more. Don didn't know how well he and Charlie knew each other, but he was pretty sure that they two of them were the only people left in the world who drank lemonade full of limes and cherries. At the time, Don had listened to Terry because she was a pretty girl talking about love; she was still pretty, but now he listened because she didn't need to use a federal crime as an excuse to call her sister.

Don stood for a while at the front door, tugging at the cockeyed deadbolt, trying to decide whether he should go talk to Charlie, or wait until his brother cooled off, or just stop trying so hard. He was thinking so intently about what Terry had said that he was startled when the bolt and its screw came loose in his hands. He'd pulled it loose from the molding without even realizing it. Damn, could he touch anything tonight without ruining it! Stupidly, he held the hardware up against the wall, as though it might somehow mend itself. It didn't, of course, so he put it in his pocket. He'd just come back tomorrow, he figured, to fix what he'd broken. And maybe talk to his brother.


	5. empathy

The next day started well. Don slept better than he'd thought he would. People with better jobs than his decided to take a long weekend, so his commute was reasonable for once. It was Friday and he had no major cases eating up his weekend. He even got a cup of coffee before the office machine turned it to sludge. A good day, until he noticed that the big white board had been hauled from the conference room into the hallway and covered with names. His name was listed under "Group Five; Second Floor Conference Room." More enrichment stuff, this time in small groups. Don had tried to get out of today's program—not because he didn't think Terry would do a great job, but because he was absolutely swamped with reports. He hated being behind at work, hated having to sit in seminars and "empathize" while papers cluttered his desk, hated how that kind of disorder slowed him down, made him less efficient. He didn't understand how Charlie could work in the chaos of the garage.

He took his coffee and went to the second floor, figuring how long he'd have to work on Saturday to be caught up. David was already in the conference room, along with a few other field agents and a woman Don recognized from one of the labs. Group Five, in all its glory.

Ten minutes later, Terry arrived with a big cardboard box. "Morning, gang. Everyone got coffee? I've cut down the actual seminar time," she announced, "because I know we all have work to do. Our distinguished presenter yesterday was pretty thorough, so I'll be focusing exclusively on a schizophrenia symptom that might interfere with making an arrest." She didn't look at Don when she said this, but he knew she disliked the inefficiency of these seminars as much as he did. She characterized them as 'a little information and a lot of schmoozing'; much to David's delight, she'd called the distinguished presenter from DC a pompous windbag.

Terry reached into the box and started handing things out, tossing them to Don and David, who had been standing in the back doing some schmoozing of their own over the Lakers' scores.

"A CD-player?" Don untangled the headphones from the portable player and slipped them on. "Do the taxpayers of our great nation know this is how we're spending our education budget?" he teased.

Shut up, shut up! You don't know what you're saying. Don't tell them! They can't find out! It's a secret. Don't you know about secrets, idiot! NO, no, don't let them touch you…

The sheer panic in the voice, which was barely more than a whisper, made Don feel like something was crawling along his shoulder blades. He pulled the ear buds out and suddenly realized that the rest of Group 5, including Terry, was staring at him.

"Ready to get on with the seminar?" Terry asked

"Uhm, yeah," Don swallowed, "sorry—go on."

Terry did go on, explaining that auditory hallucinations were a characteristic of some full-blown schizoid episodes. Commands, instructions, random voices. A psychiatrist at UCLA had been asking patients who behaved violently to repeat what they heard the voices say, and Terry had burned some of his files onto the CDs in the portable players she'd just handed out.

"I can tell you about these hallucinations 'til I turn blue, but that won't really help you to deal with someone who suffers from them. Instead, I want you to wear these for a day—taking them off when you drive, of course—so you all will get some sense of what it's like to try to live normally when you have symptoms like these patients'. The standard procedure for a take-down involves lots of noise, lots of yelling, because you're trying to confuse the suspect and catch him or her unaware. However, if that suspect is in the middle of a schizo-psychotic attack, the extra noise might push him or her over the edge. The suspect might not mean to disregard your instructions or act irrationally, but they literally cannot hear you. In a case like that, the agent would be competing with other voices and those voices will win out."

Don listened with half an ear to Terry's question and answer session. Trust Terry to come up with something hands-on to help you really understand what was going through someone's head. The pompous windbag could take a few lessons in empathy from her, any day. He wondered what she'd say about his problems with Charlie; he wondered if he'd ever get up the nerve to ask her opinion.

"What do we do for the rest of the day?" asked one of the other field agents "I mean, while we're wearing these?"

This time, Terry did look at Don. "Oh, just go about your normal work." She smiled. "I'm sure we all have reports to catch up on.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form


	6. last straw

Don could write a field report with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back. He'd had a lot of practice. Field reports are a constant at the FBI. If, as Charlie claims, a government office's order of magnitude is determined by the amount of paper it produces, the Bureau must be close to the top. A single case is often written up by several different agents over the course of the investigation, with copies filed with branch, local and regional offices. Additional copies go to Quantico, Langley and Guantanimo Bay, as well as the Pentagon and both houses of Congress. Occasionally, even the press outlets get copies, but that usually means someone's head is about to roll.

Don wrote excellent reports, which was one of the reasons he'd risen so quickly through the ranks. His trick was to pretend that he was writing to Charlie: someone very smart, but not familiar with FBI procedure. One of his instructors—an Academy fossil who'd been teaching procedural methods since J. Edgar Hoover was a recruit—had gone so far as to announce to the whole class that "Mr. Eppes has a particularly felicitous style, neither insulting nor assuming." Don took a lot of ragging over that one: "Oh, hi, Mr. Eppes, how felicitous to see you."; "How're you doing, Don? Neither insulting nor assuming, I hope?" It was nice, though, to be the best at something academic. He never talked about that instructor, but he'd never forgotten it, either. (He wondered whether Terry remembered? Of course not. That was just some professor talking out of his hat a million years ago. Why would she remember something like that?)

Charlie said Don was always getting stuck with reports because he could spell, but the truth was that Don usually offered to write team reports. Part of it was perfectionism: he wanted to see the job done right. But most of it was the knowledge that a report, once written, was hard to get rid of. It was sent to so many places and copied and filed and handed around. Sooner or later, someone, maybe some Charlie, would see it as part of a pattern. Reports were boring, yes, and formulaic, but they spoke for the dead and the disenfranchised. Don didn't mind a little extra work.

Don remembered that he _had_ once written a report with his hand tied behind his back. Actually, the arm had been in a cast, but same effect. He had written reports at crime scenes, surrounded by gore and fingerprint dust. He had written on red-eye flights after three days in the field with no sleep. Once, due to overcrowding at the Academy, he'd been assigned a desk near the shooting range; the whole carrel had jumped six inches off the floor with every volley. Still, he'd always finished the report. Now, though, he just couldn't seem to focus.

He'd been staring at the same file for the better part of an hour, unable to tame his thoughts into a coherent paragraph. The voices on Terry's CD kept interrupting. Several times, he'd start a sentence, only to find that he was repeating himself. Even when the voices were silent, Don found himself anticipating them, daring them to speak up even as he hoped they wouldn't. They screamed, whispered, demanded, instructed, teased; they said terrible things and illogical nonsense. He found himself trying to answer them or predict what they would say next. David stopped once, on his way back from the coffee maker, and tried to talk but was apparently interrupted by the voices on his CD player. He rolled his eyes, scrawled a note on one of Don's discarded folders and went back to his own desk. "These voices are driving me nuts!" he wrote.

Don gave in after six hours. The last straw had been a call from the personnel division, a mix-up concerning an insurance policy held by one _Ronald_ Epps at a branch office in Oklahoma. Trying to answer the soft-spoken secretary on the phone while listening to recorded expletives made him feel like his head was going to explode. Finally, he hung up on the poor woman and grabbed his jacket.

"I'm heading out early ," he told David on his way to the door, "I have to stop by the hardware store for Charlie."

David, frazzled and jumpy, looked up. His desk was covered with balled up papers and legal pads with crossed-out sentences. Radiating frustration, he stared at Don for a minute before recognizing him, then reached up and pulled off his headphones: "Say what?"


	7. inside out

Don circled the block twice, simply enjoying the silence of his car. Just as he'd walked into the hardware store, the CD had cut to a track of someone shouting the alphabet song. At the same time, an over-eager store employee had tried to strike up a conversation about the weather ("Hot enough for you?"). Their exasperating three-way conversations—Don listening to the nagging voices and trying to answer the employee's questions—had ended with Don losing his cool and storming out of the store. Moreover, he'd been so distracted that bought nails instead of screws. Well, he'd just have to use nails: no way was he going back.

On his second loop around the block, Don saw his father pulling out of the driveway. Charlie was at the kitchen door, barely visible behind three bags of groceries, trying to pull his house keys from his pocket without spilling everything.

"Hey, what's up?" Don asked, opening the door with his own key and catching a package of tomatoes as they tumbled out of one bag. "Where's Dad going?"

Charlie staggered into the kitchen and piled the groceries on the table. Don placed the tomatoes on the very top of the pile and stepped back to gauge the effect. Charlie dropped into a chair to catch his breath. "He went to another supermarket—our third!—because they might have cheaper pasta. This after we'd been all over town looking for some special…I don't know, some kind of radish!"

Don rolled his eyes. Now that Alan was doing most of the cooking, his father's inner gourmet was often at odds with his natural thriftiness.

"He dropped me off so that the ice cream wouldn't melt," Charlie explained, raking his hair out of his eyes. He dislodged a small avalanche of tuna fish cans in his search for that ice cream. "Also, I got the feeling that he wanted me out of the car. I was explaining to him that the supermarket was 10 minutes from the house in a car that gets 28 miles to a gallon, so unless the pasta is at least 15 cents cheaper than at the other places, he's not really saving any money. Not with the price of gas these days."

Don pulled off his jacket and unsnapped his holster, draping them over a kitchen chair. It was weird hearing Charlie complain about gas prices. He noticed that the holster was wearing a thin patch into the lining of his jacket; eventually, the whole thing would start to unravel from the inside out. Damn: he lost more clothing that way…

"What's with the CD player?" Charlie asked as Don pulled it out of the hardware store bag.

"Part of Terry's latest project." Don explained the details and Charlie was, of course, fascinated.

"So what causes the hallucinations?" he asked

"Stress, usually," Don said, untangling the headphones cord, "And since lots of stress can cause violent outbreaks, the voices can sometimes be a warning sign. Or at least something to take into account if you're, you know, talking someone down from a bridge."

"Do that much?"

Don turned to see Charlie had paused at the fridge with an armful of broccoli, looking curious. "Uhm, no. No, they don't usually call the FBI for stuff like that."

Charlie shrugged and continued putting away groceries. Don wandered into the hallway to pick through the junk drawer in the hall table. He thought there was a small hammer in there, exiled when Charlie turned the garage into Math Central. There were a few disjointed shouts from the CD player, but they quickly subsided into mumbles.

"It must be a problem with the cochlear nerve," Charlie called from the kitchen.

"What must be?" Don asked

"The cause of the hallucinations. Sounds are transmitted as waves," Charlie explained, looking up from the cereal box he was holding, "like all energy. Those little bones in the middle ear act as a transducer, changing the air waves from outside the ear to fluid vibrations in the inner ear. The cochlear nerve picks up those vibrations as electrical impulses."

Don pulled off the headphones and watched his brother step across the kitchen as though he were following the energy changes: from sound source to middle ear to inner ear to nerve.

"That's what it means to 'hear' something: you register those electrical changes in the auditory cortex of the brain. An auditory problem isn't a problem with your ears; it's just the brain picking up electrical impulses and decoding them as though they were from sound waves, when really they're just random disturbances. It would be like…well, if we thought there was a thunderstorm going on just because the kitchen lights flickered but actually the flickering might be from a wiring problem in the house."

"How do you know this stuff?" Don asked. He thought the thunderstorm analogy was not the clearest example Charlie had ever come up with but, judging from Terry's talk, the idea of having an electrical storm in your head was actually not a bad description for schizophrenia.

"Well, acoustics is just physics, and physics is really just—"

"Math," Don fishished.

Charlie grinned self-consciously. He had now made a full circuit of the kitchen and was still holding the cereal box. "Yeah. Besides, Larry knew some people who were working on celestial acoustics. They used to think there were no sounds in space because there was no atmosphere, no elastic medium for the energy waves to travel though."

"So, in space, no one can hear you scream?" Don joked. His brother just looked at him, puzzled. Don shook his head: trust Charlie to know everything about acoustics and yet never have seen _Alien_. Charlie wouldn't recognize Sigourney Weaver if she introduced herself by name at a math conference.

"In fact, not only are there sounds in space, celestial objects actually _create_ sound. Each planet, for instance, has its own distinct sound. The Earth vibrates at a 7.2 hertz frequency, which is very low in the key of G." Charlie's hands opened and closed, wishing for some chalk, a diagram. "One of Larry's friends says the earth sounds sad."

"How can something inanimate sound 'sad?'" Don asked.

Charlie looked baffled, like the question had never occurred to him. "I don't know," he said finally, "that's just the word he used."

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	8. harmonic convergence

The voices picked up then and Don went back to searching for the hammer. He was on track 15, maybe halfway through the CD. He'd gotten to recognize some of the voices now, or at least the voices of the patients who were repeating what they heard. This patient watched a lot of TV: knew all the advertising jingles, liked to call imaginary basketball games.

Don looked up suddenly to find Charlie sitting on the kitchen counter, watching him. "Sorry—did you say something?"

"I just wondered if listening to that gave you a more sincere appreciation for John Nash? It's probably a reasonable facsimile of what he hears on bad days." Charlie asked.

Don could hear the smile in his brother's voice and mentally made a deal with Terry: he would listen to the CD all day, just as soon as he finished this conversation.

"Look," Don tugged off the headphones and leaned back against the hall table so he and Charlie could see each other down the length of the hallway, "I didn't mean to sound like you were making stuff up."

Charlie started spreading Nutella on a graham cracker so that he wouldn't have to look at Don. He was wearing beat-up blue jeans and a t-shirt that said _Physics Is phun!_; the h in physics had been crossed to look like Planck's Constant. Sitting there with his bare feet dangling above the kitchen linoleum, he looked all of fourteen, making an after school snack. The Nutella was a recent addiction, a taste Charlie had picked up at a conference in Europe. Conference in Europe, Don reminded himself. His brother might look like a teenager, but he was a respected PhD, a full professor who jetted around the world using phrases like 'more sincere appreciation,' 'reasonable facsimile,' 'unlikely to be the case in a second such encounter.' Don could practically hear Charlie saying that last phrase. Still, he knew if he asked Charlie to spell facsimile, Charlie would put in an x. He knew so much, but not everything.

"It's just that…well, it's the opposite. I believe everything you say. I mean, you say there are UFOs, I start looking for them."

Charlie looked stung. "I would never give you the wrong information. And there _was_ an Unexplained Arial Event"

Why, Don wanted to know, why could he not _just once_ say something so that his brother would understand? "I know," he began again, "I know you wouldn't. What I mean is, I wouldn't know if something _were _wrong. With you, not with the information." He took a deep breath and tried another tack. "Charlie, you go places, in your head, where I can't follow. And that's fine, as long as you can get back. But what if you get…lost in there? Some really smart people do; they can't help it, what they're thinking about is just so, I don't know…"

"Tempting?" Charlie offered. He'd stopped eating now and Don had his full attention. "It is," he said simply, "Very tempting. My numbers are exciting and beautiful and who doesn't what to make a little more sense out of the world? Isn't that what we're all after—you and me and Larry and Dad and Terry? We all want to know why things are the way they are. But I _do_ know what's real and what's just theory or make-believe or whatever. For one thing," he smiled ruefully, "the stuff in my head makes perfect sense." He looked around for something to occupy his hands, started playing with the jar of Nutella. "You don't need to protect me from my own mind, Don. And this is not a new development; so why worry now?" Charlie looked up quickly. "Is this because of Mom?"

It was, some of it, because their mother had been just fine and then suddenly so very, very sick. Beyond help, the doctors said, and all in a matter of weeks. But most of it was because of Finn, whose logical mind had been hijacked and used against him. And a little was because Terry's CD had gotten him thinking about new things. Don was trying to figure out exactly how to say this when he heard a car door slam.

"Hey, boys!" Alan called. "Come help me with these groceries!"

Charlie jumped off the kitchen counter. "I've got it—you keep working on that lock." He tossed Don the bag from the hardware store and opened the back door. "Oh, my…Dad," he called out to Alan, "I know there was a sale but, come on, did you leave any pasta for the rest of Los Angeles?"

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	9. abnormal

In the end, it took all three of them to get everything back inside: it was a big sale, Alan explained sheepishly. He and Charlie set off for the garage, still talking about the price of gas, and Don headed back to the house to finish with the deadbolt. In his head, Don replayed his conversation with Charlie, letting it block out the recorded voices as he assembled the lock hardware.

Don knew what Charlie had been too young to remember: that not all of the logic games and math puzzles Charlie had been given as a young child were IQ tests. Some of them—quite a few, actually—were diagnostics for Asperger's syndrome, autism, a bevy of psychosocial disorders. Don hadn't understood the significance of them until after a semester of freshman psychology but when he'd asked his mother, she'd confirmed his suspicions.

As a kid, Don had been 'all boy' according to his mother: chatty, rambunctious, always asking questions, climbing furniture, commanding a cast of real and imaginary friends. In contrast, Charlie was biddable and responsive, but anxious around strangers and quiet at home. He was at the later end of the spectrum for developmental milestones like walking and talking. Don remembers his parents trying to coax Charlie into smiling for photos. Usually, they were unsuccessful: in most of Charlie's baby pictures, he stares solemnly into the camera, a little perplexed, unaware that he's supposed to mimic the photographer's happy expression. In the few snapshots that feature Charlie's gentle, delighted baby smile, Don is just outside the frame, making silly faces.

The early tests had been to rule out problems as much as to uncover genius. "I knew he was a bright baby," their mother had told Don, "You both were. I didn't need tests for that; but I did need to know how a three-year-old could occupy himself for hours staring at the pattern on the carpet."

Don reached for a second nail, holding it in place with his left hand. He didn't think Charlie suspected any of this (why should he? He had placed out of Psych 101). Don himself thought of it only on those occasions when he had to explain that, no, Charlie didn't drive, that his brother wasn't dating anyone, that he still lived at home. On those occasions, Don remembered Charlie explaining the normal curve when they were in high school. Charlie had used human intelligence as an example. He'd drawn a bell curve—"the center point is 100: that's average intelligence"—and then lopped off the tails on either end—"this bit on the left, under 65 or so, is mental retardation; the corresponding section on the right is classified as genius." Charlie had looked up, then, to make sure that Don was getting the point. "Genius and retardation are both _abnormal_," he'd said with no irony at all; "they are equally far from the average."

Movement on the porch caught the corner of Don's eye. He looked up to see a tall blond young man with his arms full of books. One of Charlie's students, obviously. Don hadn't even heard him because of the CD.

"Hey," Don smiled. He wondered if he'd been talking out loud. He'd caught himself doing that several times since he'd started wearing Terry's CD player, trying to keep his thought separate from the recording by drowning it out. "Uhm, if you're looking for Charl—er, Professor Eppes is out in the garage, he kind of has an office there. I'd let you in this way, but I'm fixing the door. If you go around the side, it's right out back"

The kid nodded but didn't move, just started flipping through one of his books. Don gave up on him and resumed hammering. No wonder Charlie fit in so well at CalSci: no one there had any social skills! No more interruptions: he _was_ going to finish this damn lock, today, if only he could keep his mind on it. Another flicker of movement. Don was distracted just for a second, but it was exactly the wrong moment: he brought the hammer down hard onto the hand that was holding the nail, slamming the thumb that he'd dislocated years ago on a baseball diamond.


	10. when to run

A/N: violence and angst and psychoses, oh my! Keep up the reviews, please!

Don dropped the hammer, narrowly missing his foot, and stumbled back toward the kitchen, cursing all the way. Terry's CD had vastly improved his vocabulary, if nothing else. He pulled open the refrigerator, but couldn't figure out how to get the ice cubes out of their tray one-handed. In the end, he just held the whole tray over his hand. Youch! He shook off the headphones, letting them dangle on their cord, and flexed his hand. Better. He'd almost forgotten the bungled catch that had dislocated his thumb six years ago, but he remembered it really well now! 

Never, in all his years of baseball, had Don been the top hitter on his team. There was always some 230-pound behemoth edging him out. Some years, there was a stringy little outfielder at the opposite end of the spectrum who kept him from being the fastest, too. What had made him good—almost good enough—was a knack he had for seeing the whole field at once. In college, his teammates had called it Eppes Instant Replay. He could parse out the confusing onslaught of sense information, separating sound a bat made connecting with the ball from the way that hit felt in your shoulders, using both to figure where the ball would go. That let him hit those confidence-building doubles and triples that cleared the bases for bigger guys. Occasionally, it let him beat Charlie at chess. He knew when to run, when to steal, when to stay the hell put. In high school, kids had called him Mama's Boy, which had enraged Charlie until Don explained it was a compliment, sort of: when the going got tough, he always ran home. Safe.

Standing at the table with the ice melting over his hand, Don had a flash of instant replay. Just as he'd swung the hammer, he'd moved his hand into its path. Only, in the slow-motion clarity of his mind's eye, it wasn't his hand that moved, it was the door beneath it. And the door had moved because that kid, Charlie's student, had jogged it gently with his foot. Had stood there with his schoolbooks and that humble student innocence and had been unable to resist causing just a little pain.

Again, a tiny movement in the corner of his vision. This time, Don knew enough to get out of the way, knew he'd left the front door open behind him, knew he did not want to be caught in the small, crowded kitchen. Back door, he thought. He thought, find Charlie. He was brought up short for just a second as the headphones, still attached to the CD player at his belt, caught in the ladder-backed kitchen chair. And in that second, something slammed into the side of his head and brought an end to all his thoughts.


	11. finally silent

When Don opened his eyes, his head hurt and there was a line running through his vision. More accurately, he head felt as though the sutures of his skull had split and the bones were riding against each other like tectonic plates in an earthquake. When he explored it with his fingers, the line proved to be the baseboard; he was lying on the kitchen floor. Slowly, slowly, Don got to his hands and knees and then pulled himself up to the counter. He left bloody fingerprints on the wood. Normally, he had an iron stomach—an occupational perk—but seeing blood in his brother's house made Don feel sick. Hand-over-hand, he made his way to the sink and ran cold water over his wrists until the chill finally registered.

It was still hard to think of Charlie as a home-owner, especially in the kitchen. Not that his brother didn't cook. He did, and quite well, but he was not exactly domestic. Charlie followed recipes meticulously and the results were usually faultless, if unoriginal. Don had been over a few weeks ago and Charlie had made chili in exact accordance with a recipe from the newspaper. It had been good, but… "This chili has no soul!" Alan had said sadly when Charlie had gone back to the kitchen for more rice. He had sounded so mournful that Don had laughed until he choked.

Charlie. Alan. Don focused his thoughts by sheer will. He couldn't let his mind wander. First things first: jacket pocket, cellphone, police. At least his throbbing head put his bruised thumb back in perspective, he thought grimly. He took a step; something snapped under his shoe. It was the belt clip from Terry's CD player: fighting dizziness, Don glanced around the kitchen. The CD player had cracked under his weight when he'd fallen near the stove; its voices were finally silent. Don took in the rest of the room, pretending it was an anonymous crime scene. The contents of a drawer scattered over the counter. One kitchen chair knocked over. His empty holster hanging on the back of a second chair. The weapon, his own hammer, in the corner. His handcuffs kicked under the table. No jacket. Wait…_empty_ holster. _Oh, God._

Don blinked, trying to clear his fuzzy vision. He reached down, keeping his head perfectly level, and fumbled for his cuffs. He remembered how he'd teased Terry, offering to let her bring hers to dinner with Alan… Alan. Charlie. Focus. His jacket was gone. His gun was gone. Someone was loose in the house.

Don put the cuffs in his pocket and let himself out the back door, closing it quietly behind him. No need to let his attacker know he was up and about. Charlie would have his cellphone with him in the garage. The voices started up again as he moved toward the garage and he reached up to pull off the headphones off before remembering that the headphones were still tangled in the kitchen chair. The voices were coming from the garage, but there was something familiar in their manic intensity. Don was confused, off-balance, slow to remember things, slower to react. Of course the kid hadn't stayed in the house: Don had _told_ him Charlie was in the garage. Stupid, stupid…okay, not the time for blame. Don took a deep breath. His body was starting to fight the pain, his vision was clearing. He could hold out for a little longer.

Leaning against the wall of the garage, Don tried to gauge the intruder's position by the sound of his voice. Instead, he heard Charlie.

"Anthony—_Anthony!_ Listen to me," Charlie's voice wavered "You need to calm down. We both need to—look, you have to, you've got to just….Hey, don't! Don't do that. Just…uh,. stop, put that down…"

Anthony Padgett. The student with the crazy notebook. Don was furious with himself: he'd recognized that Padgett was unstable and dangerous, had seen something that reminded him of the profiles he's studied at Quantico and still he'd done nothing! What did he expect, an engraved invitation? Weren't those notebooks invitation enough? The panic in Charlie's voice was almost more than Don could take. His brother was not equipped to deal with this kind of threat. Just having someone with a gun in the garage, his special place, was enough to make Charlie act irrationally.

The second voice—Anthony's—was talking now. Ranting about math. Don couldn't tell if he was making any sense at all, but the voice was kind of muffled; he'd bet Padgett was facing the back wall, back to the open door, blocking Charlie's exit. Suddenly, Charlie let out a painful yelp.


	12. schoolboy

Don swung himself around the door frame, ending up against the inside wall of the garage halfway behind a blackboard. The motion made his head spin; for a few seconds he saw the interior of the garage in triplicate.

Charlie was sitting at a paper-strewn desk, looking like a chastised student in his CalSci t-shirt while Padgett paced in front, wearing Don's jacket and ranting like a mad lecturer. He had a kitchen knife in his right and Don's gun in his left. Don could tell from the way he waved it around that Padgett didn't know the first thing about firearms. If startled, he might well shoot Charlie by accident. Or, Don thought, Padgett could just as easily shoot Charlie intentionally. In the narrow confines of the garage, you wouldn't have to be a crack shot to hit what you were aiming at.

"The parameters of the threespace…..proves beyond doubt…..never listen, never even listen---can't understand. Only I can…"

Don's head was pulsing with pain and his hearing cut in and out. Charlie kept glancing behind him as though an exit would appear in the back wall. _No, no_, Don coached silently, _do not ever take your eyes off the man with the gun_. He couldn't tell whether Charlie had seen him. Don tried to catch his brother's eye. Charlie was kind of slumped over; he looked lopsided, somehow. Don blinked him into focus. Charlie was bleeding: half of his shirt was saturated with blood

Anthony Padgett was getting more and more agitated, pacing faster, talking louder. He wasn't a big guy; the tall but skinny schoolboy from the porch. Normally taking him down would be no problem. But normally, Don could see straight and hear right. Normally he had equal or superior firepower and back up. Normally he wasn't dealing with someone who veered from shy to violent in less than the time it took to hammer a nail into place.

Don wasn't sure he could get out of the garage without being noticed. Even if he did, could he get back to the house and summon help before Padgett had a complete meltdown?

"Go away! Leave me alone!" Padgett shouted, although Charlie hadn't said anything.

"It's still wrong," Charlie said, as calmly as if Padgett had asked him a question during office hours. "But I think it can be corrected quite simply."

_Wrong_, Don thought. With violently unpredictable suspects, you need to be either forceful or obsequious. _They are God and you are dirt, or vice versa. You don't talk to them like you're on the same level._ _ And you certainly don't disagree with them_.

Padgett stopped pacing and stared at Charlie. "Doesn't need to be fixed," he seethed. "It's perfect."

Charlie looked at him. "Halfway through the third equation, there's a series with F sub 1 in the denominator. If F sub 1 is zero, your solution is invalid. Division by zero is an undefined operation."

Don held his breath, certain that it could be heard in the sudden silence. Miraculously, something inside Padgett seemed to respond to Charlie's professorial tone.

"If you adjust your answer set so that it includes solutions such that the F sub1is _not_ zero, you should be fine." Charlie picked up a pencil, careful not to make any sudden movement, not to break eye contact. He kept his wounded right hand in his lap. "Here." He held the pencil out to Anthony. Anthony, he reminded himself, trying to connect with Carol's oddball student, the strange but harmless student who needed help with a flawed thesis. "Anthony, take the pencil and correct your work."

Don knew what his brother was doing. Knew it as clearly as if Charlie's mathematical logic had somehow cut through the tension and the pain in his head. Take the pencil, Anthony, he urged mentally.

Padgett tightened his grip on the knife, but he put the gun down, his eyes flicking between Charlie and the notebooks spread out on the desktop. He recognized his notebooks. The numbers were clear and quiet and certain, like always. Professor Eppes faded out of his vision as he focused on his equation, his elegant and perfect Equation Number Three.


	13. not an exit

As soon as Don saw pencil touch paper, he launched himself across the garage's open space. Left hand in left hand, right hand—once again, his clever Quantico move was going to come up a little short, more of a controlled fall than anything else. His vision had cleared while he stood against the wall but his sudden jump across the garage made him so dizzy he do little more than slam into Padgett and try to pin him down. The student sprawled across the desk under Don's weight and his knife went skittering into the corner. Charlie snatched the gun out of reach. Don managed to latch the cuffs onto Padgett's left hand, but couldn't grab his flailing right arm. The free cuff swung wildly until Charlie grabbed it and snapped it onto the first fixed object he could find: a drawer pull on his side of the desk.

Padgett howled, flinging Don off him, wrenching the drawer to the edge of its rollers. Don staggered backwards in a spray of scrap paper and chalk, convinced that Padgett would tear the desk to pieces. Somehow, amazingly, it held against Padgett and his kicking, screaming fury. Don and Charlie stood, panting, on either side of the desk with Padgett between them until he'd finally exhausted himself into a twitching, mumbling heap.

Don caught his breath and said the first thing that came to his mind: "That's a hell of a desk." Not some piece of IKEA crap, he thought irrelevantly, unable to process anything more significant. It was probably a cast-off from the city planning office, one of those metal and wood office tanks that were supposed to protect you during Civil Defense drills back in the day. Dad must have brought it home when it became evident that no student desk could hold up to the abuse Charlie put it through. Which reminded him, where _was_ Dad?

"Don?" Charlie looked rumpled and disoriented, as though he'd just woken up. "I don't— " He held out Don's gun, blinking as though he were surprised to find it in his hand. "I don't want this." Don moved to take it from him, forcing his mind to move forward. There was something he should ask Charlie, a question that had been on the tip of his tongue. He blinked away the starbursts of blackness on the edges of his vision, tried to focus on his brother. Charlie was holding his torn right arm against his chest like a bird with a broken wing. Dominant hand defensive wounds, said Don's inner agent; he could see a bone gleaming wetly and suddenly he remembered: "Hey, where's…."

Don didn't have to finish the question: he was standing close enough to see over the desk, now, to see what Charlie had kept looking for earlier. Not an exit.

Alan was crumpled in the back of the garage, beneath a makeshift fort of blackboards. He looked gray; Don thought for a minute that, like everything else in here, he'd been covered by a thin coat of chalk dust. Except for his shirtfront, which was liquid and red.

Don couldn't tell if the wound was deep enough to suck. He couldn't hear over the renewed rushing in his ears; it sounded like someone had opened the taps to put out the flames in his head. Felt like he was underwater, too: everything going dim and blurry. He took a disoriented step towards his father, but he was moving through something thicker than air. He lurched sideways, plowing into Charlie instead of going forward. How had Charlie gotten here? Don tried to strand up straight: he was too heavy for his brother to support.

Charlie was saying something. Don could see his lips moving, but he knew that if he tried to respond, he would get a mouthful of water. And then he would drown. Besides, it was just too hard to focus on Charlie's pale and anxious face. Very dizzy. He thought he would close his eyes for just a minute, but then he found they wouldn't open again. Didn't matter; if he held on long enough, he would just float to the surface. Floating felt like sinking, though, like sinking down to the floor. That happened in water, sometimes: you got disoriented. He remembered swimming in the ocean. Don felt fingers on his throat, undoing the collar button, feeling for a pulse, cradling his head. He knew they were Charlie's hands because they were gentle and shaking so fiercely.

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	14. queen of angels

Charlie stayed at Queen of Angels hospital for nearly 72 hours, long after he'd been officially released. A chatty internist at the start of her shift had arranged a blood transfusion and stitched him up.

"How do you feel?" she'd asked solicitously.

That had confused him. "I don't feel anything," he'd answered.

"Oh, good," she smiled, "that means the painkillers are working!"

She'd offered to show him the X-rays—"you can actually see a chip on the ulna. Takes a _lot_ of force to do that with a kitchen knife!"—but Charlie declined.

After that, he'd given statements to the police, confirming that the attacks were not related to ongoing FBI investigations, promising to notify them if he had to suddenly leave the state. Terry had shown up to walk him through that part and he left a lot of it in her hands. David had come, too, and offered to drive him home but Charlie explained that Larry was coming to pick him up.

He didn't call Larry, though, and when he saw the physicist wandering around the intake area, trying to catch the nurse's attention, Charlie quietly walked the other way.

There were signs reminding him to turn off his cellphone lest it bother other patients. So he turned it off. And then he left it on the ledge above the sink in one of the men's room.

On the second day, he was paged over the hospital intercom: "Charles Edward Eppes, your party is waiting at B Exit; Dr. Eppes, please meet your party at B Exit." Charlie was in the elevator when he heard the announcement and the man next to him joked about medicine's finest getting lost in their own hospital. It wasn't a funny joke, but Charlie laughed anyway. He decided not to explain to the man that someone had made a mistake. _His_ party was in the thoracic trauma unit, where his father lay behind a battery of machines, and in Don's observation cubicle on the second floor.

Charlie spent visiting hours dozing in various lounges with outpatients and daily visitors. He bought packets of crackers at vending machines and drank weak coffee from the depressing hospital café, thinking that this was how his classmates had lived when they were starving on student loans and he was at home eating his mother's cooking. He worked a newspaper crossword with a woman waiting for her dialysis appointment but left the waiting room before they got to the math puzzle on the facing page. Only one person asked him what he was doing there, a kid who'd busted her ankle playing soccer and seemed impressed by the amount of bandages swathing Charlie's right arm.

"An accident," Charlie explained, "I was involved in a very bad accident."

He spent the night in a chair next to Alan's bed. He wasn't supposed to be there—visiting hours were over and this was a closed ward. But he still wore his hospital intake bracelet and no one noticed that it was outdated. Besides, he was young and quiet and politely held the doors for the nurses when they came around with trolleys of supplies. For the most part he sat quietly, occasionally reaching through the web of wired and tubes to straighten Alan's blankets.

Only 17 percent of shots fired at less than 10 feet in a crisis situation actually hit their target, so Charlie figured Anthony probably hadn't even been aiming. He'd just gotten lucky. Or maybe Alan had gotten unlucky. Like a math problem, there was no human agent: just cause and effect. The gun fired a bullet, the bullet chipped a rib, the rib punctured a lung, there's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza. The 17 percent statistic had come from Don. Don had looked it up at work somewhere, written it down on a scrap of paper and brought the paper home to Charlie. A sort of peace offering after the sniper case, an acknowledgment that he had convinced Charlie to do something that Charlie would rather not have done.

Alan came to early in the morning, just briefly enough to recognize Charlie's presence and smile at him. He didn't talk and obviously didn't remember exactly what had happened. If he had, Charlie thought, he wouldn't have looked so pleased to see his younger son.

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	15. roots

Charlie sat with his father until Alan dropped back to sleep. When the mid-morning shift of the nursing staff arrived, heralding the start of visiting hours, he slipped off the ward. The nurses seemed to recognize that he did not belong with the crowd of visitors milling around with balloons and small plants and get-well cards. For lack of anything better to do, he bought a cup of coffee, borrowed a pen from the café cashier and started doodling on the paper napkins next to the creamer station, listing cube roots in columns. It took a while to get the hang of writing with his bandaged hand but the only time he faltered was when it occurred to him that this kind of single-mindedness would have worried Don. Charlie had to consider that for a moment—but, no, this was not N vs. NP. This wasn't math at all; it was biology. It was shock.

Charlie liked having a name for this shivery anxious feeling; it _had_ been shocking, too. He'd been in the garage, alone, trying to remember the comments he'd wanted to make on Amita's thesis, and then Dad had followed him in. And then, suddenly, Anthony and then Don. And there had been shouting and blood and he hadn't known what to do. Stay with Alan? Run for help? Try to overpower Anthony? There were too many variables, too many people; he'd always been so _bad_ at reading people. In the end he'd tried to solve it the way he would any problem: starting small, fixing what he knew was wrong—the denominator in equation three. It hadn't worked. He'd chosen the wrong mechanism and everyone had gotten hurt and then he'd been alone again.

Absently, Charlie smoothed out the napkins. They had the Queen of Angles logo printed on them: an intertwined Q and A. Question/Answer, he thought. He'd used up the whole stack without realizing it. Cube roots had been what he'd recited to himself while he waited for the ambulance to come. After Don had passed out, Charlie called 911 from his cellphone; the dispatcher had tried to keep him on the line but he'd hung up so that he could keep pressure on Alan's bullet wounds. Charlie hadn't realized that his father's lung had been punctured by the cracked rib, so he'd just tried to remember everything Don had ever told him about first aid. There had been so much blood; he'd practically had his hand inside his father's chest. Charlie had wanted to stay close to Don, too, but he worried that moving his brother closer might cause him more pain. In the end, he left Don stretched out on the floor, looking like a bizarre postmodern Hamlet in the disordered garage. Charlie had tried to keep talking, though, in case Don could hear him. First he started to repeat things that Larry had told him, stories about mathematicians, but he couldn't remember them all. Now, he recognized the forgetfulness as an early sign of shock. At the time, though, Charlie had really thought he was losing his mind, that his memory was seeping out of him with his blood. That had frightened him, made him angry: he'd yelled at Anthony.

Why? Charlie had shouted, what had he been doing? what had he been thinking? why? He hadn't gotten an answer; Anthony had shrunk away to the far corner of the desk and continued pulling at the handcuffs with his teeth and his free hand. He'd actually _growled_. In the end, Charlie found he had no more questions, no anecdotes left, so just repeated the cube roots. Oddly, that had seemed to have a pacifying effect on Anthony, too.

Squaring the edge of the napkins, Charlie slipped them back into their little holder before getting up to throw away his styrofoam cup. He imagined people—those balloon-toting visitors, the exhausted internists, maybe even that soccer kid (did she drink coffee?)—grabbing one and finding themselves with a list of cubes. The thought made him smile for the first time in two days. He checked his watch. Visiting hours were over. It was time to go see Don.

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	16. night

Don was more heavily sedated than Alan had been, an uncommon procedure for cranial wounds but apparently necessary because Don was given to tossing and turning. He wasn't hooked up to any machines but he did have to lay flat so his head could heal. "He's a restless one," the shift nurse explained. "Must be looking for that pretty girl who came to visit, huh?" she teased. "Yeah, well, he's always looking for someone," Charlie responded without much enthusiasm, glad that the nurse wasn't going to ask for ID. Glad, too, that he'd skipped visiting hours: the pretty girl must have been Terry and she would have wanted to talk.

Logically, Charlie knew that Alan's injury was more serious. Still, he'd always had a secret horror of head injuries, the way a concert pianist might have a paranoia about broken fingers. Alan had a broken rib and a partially-deflated lung, plus the actual entry and exit wounds; still it could have been much, much worse. With Don, there was no way to judge the damage until he woke up, and no point in waking him up until his injuries healed. The nurse said Don had ducked most of the blow, but Charlie knew there was no such thing as a flesh wound where your head was concerned; just about everything was vital. By the time they'd interviewed Charlie, the police had identified a hammer as the likely weapon in Don's attack. A hammer. If Don hadn't had impeccable reflexes from years of batting practice; if Anthony had been a little handier, more physically coordinated, if he'd used the claw edge of the hammer… That thought didn't go any further; Charlie barely made it to a sink before choking up a thin stream of coffee. It took him five minutes to calm down enough to go back to his chair by Don's bed.

It was little eerie, being alone there. Charlie understood now why people came to visiting hours in groups. He couldn't remember ever seeing Don quite so still. Alan claimed that both his sons had inherited a host of finger-drumming, pen-tapping, head-scratching fiddly habits from their energetic mother. Don had managed to curb most of those by sheer force of will because they made other people jumpy ("no one wanted to be my stake-out partner," he'd joked) but Charlie always recognized the current of nervous energy that matched his own. Even Terry had once made an off-hand comment about Don kicking off the covers in his sleep. Charlie remembered blushing the color of a stop sign, half an hour after Terry's remark, when he'd put two-and-two together and realized how she would know about Don's sleeping habits.

Now, however, Don was calm and quiet. Charlie took Don's limp hand in his own, just because it looked so _wrong_ passively folded over the pristine blankets. He ran his fingers over the bruised and swollen thumb, half expecting Don to wince at the light pressure. The human hand was surprisingly heavy, Charlie thought, without the arm supporting it. He had a sudden mental image of the giant stone hands on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Between his conventions and his consulting work, Charlie had been to DC quite a few times and he always went to the Lincoln Memorial, even if he was just passing through. Someday, he would have to arrange a field trip, maybe collaborate with the FBI. Every time he went to the Memorial, there were always groups of kids on field trips. Of course, he'd have to find some mathematical way to justify it, maybe something to do with geometry. He imagined explaining to his students how the angle of light bouncing off the reflecting pond served to illuminate the otherwise dark interior of the monument. He told them about the number of steps and how…he stopped talking. Anthony Padgett was standing in the tour group. Anthony watching him over the heads of the other students; Anthony who didn't have a notebook like everyone else, who was just standing there with one hand in his pocket. The other students had stopped taking notes now. They were waiting for Charlie to finish his sentence about the stairs. No one else had noticed Anthony; he blended in so well. What did he have in his pocket?

Charlie opened his mouth to shout a warning and woke himself up with a start. He'd nodded off. He'd been dreaming. Charlie blinked and sat up in the chair, trying to get his bearings and coax his heart rate back to normal. He'd fallen asleep sitting at Don's bedside and now he could see the sky just beginning to lighten through the tiny window. Funny that he hadn't heard the morning nurses.

As soon as that thought crossed his mind, Charlie knew that Don was dead. It took a minute for the certainty to penetrate his sleepy mind. Don had died in the night, in his drug-induced sleep, and no one had told Charlie. Blood had stopped circulating. Oxygen had ceased to be drawn into the body. No one had said anything because no one believed Charlie could handle it. They assumed he'd withdraw into himself, wrapping N vs. NP around him like a security blanket. Charlie looked at his brother, too still, too pale, his hair impossibly dark against the hospital sheets, his skin nearly blue in the weird morning light. Don's hand hung limply over the edge of the bed where Charlie had dropped it.

For an instant he couldn't move, too frightened of what he would find—or not find—but, Charlie reminded himself, he _could_ handle it. A year of working with the FBI had made him better able to deal with emotional shocks; working with Don had made him stronger. So he reached out and gently laid his good hand against his brother's chest. He was so tense that at first he missed it, the little flutter of his Don's shallow breathing. And then he could almost hear Don admonishing: "God, Charlie, you get yourself so worked up. Chill out, buddy. Haven't I told you how crazy you get when you don't sleep enough?" Crazy. And so very, very tired. The relief was unlike anything Charlie had ever felt; like a light blooming through his whole body and driving away the shadows. He slid out of his chair, onto his knees, let his head drop on the bed next to Don's outstretched hand, and cried into the sheets.

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	17. absolute value

Charlie cried until he couldn't remember what had gotten him started. Gradually the tears dried up and he could breathe again. Don really did look dead from this angle, in this light. Charlie checked his brother's pulse again, just to make sure. He stood up and wiped his eyes on the tail of the scrub t-shirt they'd given him to replace his own. Charlie remembered that his own shirt had looked like a Lizzie Borden relic when it was cut off of him in the intake ward; it had been unceremoniously dumped into a bio hazard bin. He didn't want to think about that any more.

Without any clear destination in mind, Charlie wandered out to the main hallway. Los Angeles was a big city, always brawling, and you would never know it was 5:00 AM—the hospital was as crowded and hectic as ever. Charlie let himself be swept along, thinking how the patterns of moving people could be described by fluid dynamics equations, until he ended up in the neonatal ward at the far end of the hospital. He was about to turn around, reminded himself not to forget to eat (but no more coffee, he thought), when it occurred to him that he'd never held an infant. Wait, that could't be right. He was nearly thirty. Certainly at some point in the past thirty years…no, the more he thought about it, the more certain he became. Charlie had always been the youngest of whichever group he was in; the topic of children didn't come up frequently in his mostly-male department. He might never again be this close to children this young; he stepped up to the big window that looked into the nursery. Wasn't really hungry any way.

Larry had once said that children were wormholes. Or course, Larry had also once said that we all had the same number of minutes, and that was patently untrue. How could that be true? Even if you started counting from the same point, took the absolute value of all minutes from life to death, some people just had more minutes that others. Charlie looked at the bassinets—thirty, five rows of six—and wondered how many minutes that room held and why they were not divided more evenly. He'd told Don, the other day, that math described pre-existing patterns, but he thought now that time was an exception. Sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, but twenty-four hours to a day and thirty, or thirty-one, or twenty-eight days to a month. _That _was pretty arbitrary. And then, what about Daylight Savings Time? Time didn't even obey the scientific method, for that matter, because it was irreversible. A math equation could be balanced and run forward or backward, but time went in only one direction. Charlie could subtract one from two and end up with his original number, but he could never work his way back to the way things had been the day before yesterday. There would always be a tiny chip missing from the bone in his right arm. Unlike energy or matter, time couldn't be transferred. It couldn't be saved. You had to use it while you had it, 'cause once it was gone, it was gone.

Charlie wondered if anyone would ever discover a law of conservation of time, a way of redistributing the minutes unused by people who died. He liked to think that one of the tiny bundles in one of those bassinets had ended up with his mother's extra minutes, just as another baby might some day end up with his. He was still standing there, small against the big window, when Amita found him.

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	18. morality tales

Amita had been calling Charlie's cellphone and leaving voicemail messages for a day and a half. When she finally filled the voicemail box, she called Terry Lake instead. Terry gave her the party line: "the incident involving Dr. Eppes had nothing to do with his consulting work for this agency…Dr. Eppes is not a suspect…Dr. Eppes cooperated completely and the agency has released him to his own custody…." Even as she talked, Amita could hear Terry shutting off her computer, opening and closing drawers, finding keys. "I'm leaving the office now," Terry said at the end of her spiel, "I'll meet you at the hospital."

At Queen of Angels, the two women split up; Terry would sit in Don's room and Amita would wait in Alan's. Sooner or later, Charlie would appear. Amita hated just sitting, though, and she'd started pacing, first in the room, then in the hallways. It was a habit she'd picked up from Charlie. Before long, she ended up in the neonatal ward, a kind of hospital backwater that drained people away from the bustling main corridors. And she would have recognized those curls anywhere.

"Charlie!"

Her professor turned around and blinked, gave her a wan smile to show that everything was OK. Amita was not convinced: Charlie was wrecked with exhaustion. He was jumpy and unshaven; his hair stuck up at strange angles, even his eyelids looked raw from lack of sleep. When she reached suddenly to take his hand, Charlie was so startled that he pulled away and cracked his elbow against the big window behind him.

"Charlie, it's time to go home." Amita thought for a minute that he might refuse—then what would she do? The man was her thesis advisor, for God's sake, she couldn't very well force him!—but finally he nodded absently. He didn't seem to realize that she meant _now_, so she reached out, slowly this time, and took the corner of his t-shirt. By this slight leash, she led him out of the hospital and into her car. He waited while she called Terry, then obediently climbed into the passenger seat and let her help with the seatbelt. Normally sensitive about his personal space, Charlie didn't even seem to notice that she practically had to climb into his lap to adjust the seatbelt around his bandaged arm.

"Everyone at school is asking for you," Amita began when they'd pulled out into traffic, just to make conversation. "Carol is asking for you and Marianne is just beside herself, of course. She's the one who gave Anthony your address. She didn't know, of course…that it was going to happened, I mean, she just remembered that you're always willing to meet with students over the summer."

"Hmmm, that's nice of her to remember," Charlie said distantly, his eyes fixed on the freeway. Then, a few minutes later, "Who's Marianne?"

"The secretary, Charlie—the departmental secretary!"

"Oh, oh, right. Yeah. Well, not her fault, of course." He lapsed into silence.

"And Larry wants you to call him if you need anything at all." Amita began again, glancing at Charlie from the corner of her eye, trying to remember the rest of the physicist's jumbled message. "Oh, and he says don't forget, uhm,…Moritz Schlick?

Charlie smiled at that and Amita just had to ask: "Who is Moritz Schlick?"

"He's a physicist—_was_ a physicist, I guess. He's dead now."

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Amita apologized automatically, wanting to bite her tongue, and that made Charlie look at her (finally!) and laugh. She was surprised at how glad she was to find out that his laugh hasn't changed at all.

"No, no, he's not a friend or anything," Charlie said, "The man's been dead for, like, seventy years. It's just another of Larry's Parables from the Lives of the Great Thinkers."

Amita nodded, keeping her eyes on the road, betting that Charlie won't be able to resist the teaching opportunity. She's right.

"Schlick was a student of Max Planck in Germany," Charlie started, "but he really made his mark as a professor at the University of Vienna. He led a famous philosophy discussion group." Charlie relaxed into his role as teacher, sitting up in his seat, turning to face Amita. A lot of smart people like to make the most of what they know, she thought; they like to flaunt their learning, letting others see but never touch. Charlie, on the other hand, is profligate with his knowledge: never happier than when giving it away. "There were a lot of discussion groups in Vienna at the time. The housing situation was terrible—and, you know, it gets cold, what with the Danube and all—so people spent most of their time in cafes, arguing over science and literature and architecture. But the Schlick group was known as _the_ Vienna Circle because it was the most prestigious. And, while it's most famous for philosophy logical, many of the Circle's members were mathematicians, not philosophers. Kurt Godel was a member as an undergradate. John von Neumann used to drop in when he was in Vienna. Do you know the Hahn-Banach extension theorem?"

Amita dragged the name from the corner of her mind, "You mean, like, in functional analysis?"

"That's the one. The Hahn for whom it was named was a member of the Circle. So was his wife, for that matter—Olga Neurath. She was blind and smoked cigars and wrote a fascinating paper on the algebra of classes. Did I ever assign that? I should, she's brilliant. Neurath's stuff. Yeah…for the symbolic logic seminar."

Charlie was totally lost by then, in the numbers and the Vienna damp and the smoke from Olga's cigars. He knew everything about the coterie of a long-dead German philosopher but couldn't remember the secretary whom he greeted every day of his working life. Amita would have expected nothing less.

"And then…?" she asked.

Charlie seemed to deflate. "Well, then Schlick died and the Circle kind of fell apart."

"So?"

"So— " Charlie shrugged, "it's probably just as well. The Nazis were coming to power in Vienna and they didn't look kindly upon that kind of intellectual discussion."

"Charlie!" Amita rolled her eyes, "That's not what I meant."

"What did you mean?" He asked carefully, refusing to look at her, watching instead the familiar houses on his street.

Amita pulled into the driveway and parked her car but didn't unlock the doors. "I meant that Larry's stories usually have _some_ relevance, however obscure. What's the rest of the story?"

Charlie untangled himself from his seatbelt and almost said that he didn't remember. Larry and his stupid morality tales! He was tired, his arm hurt, he didn't want to talk anymore. But Amita was a research whiz; she'd find out for herself and then she'd see more than was really there.

"The Circle dissolved when Schlick was shot and killed by one of his former students, a young man who blamed his professor for his inability to find a job. The student was, uhm, not well. Delusional. Twice he'd been committed to a psychiatric asylum for stalking Schlick. People said Schlick was too cavalier about it, that he knew this student was dangerous and didn't take sufficient precautions, preferred to believe that he was popular and beloved. The Nazis in power said that he was a godless Jew who got what he deserved." Charlie took a deep breath and unlocked his door. "Incidentally, Schlick was baptized Protestant, although he may indeed have been godless. As for what he deserved…who knows?."

Charlie climbed out of the car, steadying himself against the door for a nauseous moment: time for a few more of those hospital painkillers. He leaned down to look through the window at Amita, still behind the steering wheel. "Schlick was killed in the central stairway of the main university building while he was rushing to get to a lecture." Charlie heard the bitterness creeping into his voice, told himself to shut up and then ignored his own advice. "Apparently his students—one student in particular—knew he was habitually late to class, not unlike some professors at CalSci. Someday, when you're a professor and you go to Vienna for a conference, you'll have to go see the place; they have brass marker on the floor where it happened."

He was trying to unlock the front door when he heard her car door close. He didn't answer when she called his name. Surprisingly tricky to work a key with your non-dominant hand.

"Charlie," she said again, not moving from her place in the driveway, "what bothers you most about this?"

Something snapped inside him then, because that was the question he always asked. When his students were confused by too many variables or when they didn't know how to start a proof, Charlie would always tell them to pick just one problem, one facet of one problem, the one that bothered them most. _God_, he was tired. He wanted to tell Amita to get lost; he wanted to go upstairs to his room, climb into bed, and think about cubes until he fell asleep. He looked down the steps to where Amita was waiting. She looked uneasy and a little belligerent, aware that he might snap at her again, but determined to get the answers she'd come for. With an attitude like that she would make a hell of an impression on Vienna.

Finally, Charlie made up his mind. "Amita," he said civilly, dredging up everything his mother had ever taught him, "would you like to come inside? I don't know what we have in the way of food, but I can certainly offer you some lemonade."


	19. broken up

Terry was the first thing Don saw when he woke up. Terry sitting by his bed, her stocking feet propped up on the corner of his mattress, reading files. He had no idea how long he'd been out or how long she'd been sitting there. It must have been a while; she was favoring her left shoulder, which always bothered her after she'd been sitting for too long. That injury dated back to her first field office assignment, about a year after they'd graduated from Quantico, which is to say about a year after they'd agreed to break up. It was the mature thing to do, maybe, she'd ventured. And he'd agreed, gone one better: mature _and_ professional, he'd said, not realizing that she'd wanted him to disagree with her. Don hadn't realized he'd wanted to disagree himself until he'd seen Terry's name on an injury list months after the fact.

It hadn't been a terribly serious injury: slices from flying debris sustained when a suspect tried to shoot Terry through the concrete pillar she'd been using as cover. Not as bad as it could have been. Still, Don had wanted to send something, some flowers, a card, or—knowing Terry—a really long biography of some obscure historical figure. Strange, he remembered agonizing over whether that would be a mature and professional thing to do (would she think he was desperate? Or sexist? Or sweet?) but he couldn't remember if he'd actually sent anything. Even stranger, long after he knew it was an injury to her shoulder, all he could think of was the small, curving scar on her knee from when she'd fallen off her bike as a kid. It bothered him to know that she now had scars he wouldn't recognize; this is what it means to be broken up, he figured. What an accurate phrase.

Terry sensed his eyes on her and looked up.

"Hey, Don," she said quietly.

"Hey, Terry." His voice sounded creaky from lack of use. A flash of concern jumped across his face and he said, louder, slower: "Hello? Terry?"

"Don? What's wrong? Don!"

He lay back on his pillow, scrunched his eyes closed, then opened them and looked at her, just a little panicky in a way that made her feel more than a little ill. "Terry?"

"Yes?"

"I can't hear a word that either of us are saying."


	20. no obvious solution

For a split second, Terry just stared at him. Then she whipped out her evidence pad, wrote something, handed it to him, and hurried out of the room, dumping her files onto the floor. "Back ASAP w/ doctor," Don read. He ripped that sheet out of the notebook, just to see if he could hear the tearing, but there was nothing. He threw the whole notebook against the wall; it hit the floor as silently as snow. Feeling a little ridiculous, he reached up to touch his ears, just to make sure they were still there. Yup: ears accounted for. Somehow that just made it worse: no obvious solution.

Don didn't feel particularly disoriented: he knew he was in a hospital, and he could tell from the weird anesthetic tingle that he'd been hit on the left side of the head. But when he tried to calm down and remember what had gotten him here, things became confused. The last thing he remembered with absolute clarity was helping Charlie with the groceries. He'd left, maybe, and been in some sort of…car accident? He thought he could remember Charlie talking to him, but was that at the hospital or at home? If he'd been at home, what was Terry doing here? If it had been at the hospital, where was Charlie now?

It's hard to commandeer a doctor's attention. In a city hospital during visiting hours, it is nearly impossible, but FBI agents can be very persuasive when they want answers. Terry had a disgruntled Dr. Powell in Don's room before Don had even puzzled out the origin of the bruises on his hand. The interrogation that followed would have made Quantico proud. Within ten minutes, Powell had explained that the deafness was just temporary.

"How temporary?" Terry demanded.

The doctor rolled his eyes and flipped through Don's chart again, trying to look as though he had much better things to do. Terry was not impressed: "Doctor, please answer the question. An estimate will be fine."

"I don't know," Powell conceded, "The problem is swelling that prevents the ossicular chain from vibrating freely. Now that Mr. Eppes is conscious, we can medicate the swelling and his hearing should return within a few hours."

Powell had an annoying habit of talking only to Terry. Don wanted to remind the good doctor who the patient was in this scenario. I may be deaf, Don figured, but I'm not stupid, I can understand anything you have to say. He probably would have said as much, too, just to counteract the unaccustomed fear that was growing with the silence. Being anxious made him angry and Terry, sensing how much he hated to be out of the loop, was diligent about writing down whatever the doctor said and handing the notes to Don. That helped. Still, Don did his best not to show his relief when he read that his hearing would soon be back to normal; it would have felt like taking a favor from this self-important jerk.

Terry asked every question she could think of and relayed several of Don's. She even got Powell to draw a diagram of the ear, something the doctor obviously considered childish but that made Don envision Charlie wandering around the kitchen, putting away groceries and talking about the sad echoes of the universe. Which reminded him, where was Charlie?

Charlie hated hospitals. It wasn't a fear of blood or needles or anything like that; it was something more fundamental, something that just shriveled Charlie's normally free-ranging curiosity. He wouldn't talk about it, wouldn't even watch medical dramas on TV, and Don didn't know why. Now, Larry—Larry, among his other quirks, had an almost paranoid wariness around medicines of any sort. The physicist devoutly believed that anything stronger than children's aspirin inhibited his thinking. A particularly unfortunate belief since Larry had terrible allergies, which he tried unsuccessfully to medicate with Vitamin C tablets. When Don learned that, he figured he'd solved the problem of his brother's phobia, but Charlie had just looked surprised when Don had asked about it. "No," he'd said slowly, as though he were carefully measuring the effect of every pharmaceutical substance he'd ever touched. "No. That's an interesting theory, but either I think clearly or—or, well, or I can't. And it doesn't matter what I'm on." He seemed almost disappointed that Don's suggestion didn't fit the facts; he would have lied if it had been anyone else but Don. Only recently had Don begun to think his brother remembered more about those childhood tests than anyone else imagined.

Still, a hospital is just a building, and it was time for Charlie to get over that irrational fear. The more Don thought about it, the more irritated he became: his annoyance had a new target now. If Charlie was in the hospital, or anywhere else for that matter, no force on the planet would keep me away, he thought savagely. But here I am all by myself. And if it weren't for Terry, I'd be completely out of luck. Their parents had always kept Charlie too sheltered. They'd allowed him to avoid what he was uncomfortable with: his life is tough enough, they'd said, it's easier for everyone this way. Hey, other people had tough lives, too. And it had certainly come back to bite them when Mom got sick, now hadn't it?

Don had completely lost track of what conversation Terry was having with the doctor. He didn't care anyway. He tugged the pen out of her hand and, for lack of a piece of paper, wrote on his arm in angry capitals: WHERE'S CHARLIE?

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	21. questions of blame

Dr. Powell had gotten over his initial pique and launched into a long-winded monologue on ossicular vibrations. Don was the furthest thing from his mind; he was wondering how to work in an invitation for coffee when Terry suddenly stood up and closed her notebook.

"Thanks so much for your time, Doctor," she said sweetly, "Let me walk you out."

With her standing over him, he had no choice but to stand up himself, and once he did, she started subtly shifting him toward the door.

"We could discuss this some more," the doctor offered quickly as he backed into the hallway. "I mean, I'm sure you must have some questions about your friend's condition."

He was fishing, Terry could tell, hoping that she'd correct his use of "friend." Next, he'd giver her his pager number, tell her to call if she had any questions. Well, he could just keep hoping.

"Oh, no. No, I wouldn't want to keep you. I'm sure you're a very busy man." Terry played up the wide-eyed innocence on that line, daring him to confess that his Very Important Physician persona was just an act.

"Actually, not so busy. I mean, busy, of course, but…Hey, I usually don't give out my pager number to regular patients…" Powell stuttered.

This was getting embarrassing, so Terry finished it off with another smile: "Oh, I _completely_ understand, Doctor. I know your time is valuable; I wouldn't dream of stealing you away from your regular patients."

She gave the word _regular_ an ironic twist that Powell didn't like, but by the time he'd noted it, he was already standing alone in the hallway.

When she turned from the door to face Don, the nasty little burst she got from puncturing Powell's ego disappeared. Her partner was propped up on pillows nervously shredding a page of her notebook. She'd been the one to warn him away from those nervous habits of his, way back in school. At first she hadn't wanted to say anything. It was strangely endearing to watch him fiddle with whatever came to hand; besides, she hadn't wanted him to take it the wrong way. But finally she'd cornered him alone in a Laundromat off campus and explained that those unconscious habits made other people—clients, witnesses, other agents—really jumpy. He hadn't been insulted; Don had actually thanked her for the suggestion: "I really want to be good at this," he'd said plainly, "and I never would have noticed that." Cold turkey, all the little twitches had just ceased, at least when she was around, and that nervous energy was channeled somewhere else. As a behavioral scientist, Terry knew exactly how hard it was to break those kinds of habits. Nevertheless, Don Eppes now had one of the best poker faces in the game; during an interrogation, he could shout and threaten with the best of them, but he could also summon a physical stillness that was nothing short of eerie. Sometimes, Terry wished she'd never brought it up; guessing what Don was thinking was harder than it used to be.

Don was painstakingly tearing the paper into confetti until she sat down and then he immediately picked up the evidence notebook, flipped to a clean page, and started asking questions. He found it easiest to treat this like a standard investigation, so he numbered his questions for efficiency.

Where's Charlie?

What happened?

Whose fault?

All FBI agents ask that last question: they think in terms of law enforcement, of course, not morality. They want names of people who will be prosecuted for defying the laws that the Agency exists to uphold. Like most career agents, Don had a healthy cynicism about the whole thing. Still, Terry knew that even back at the Academy, he'd been keenly interested in questions of blame. He wanted to exonerate the innocent almost as much as he wanted to stick it to the perpetrator. "There are counselors for this kind of thing," she would tell him after he took time from an investigation to assure witnesses and victims that they were not culpable, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Yeah," he'd say, defensively, "I know. But it's a terrible thing to keep beating yourself up over what you could have done differently." He was so matter-of-fact about it, so unsentimental, she'd never known what to say to that.


	22. cold comfort

Terry quickly answered question 1: "Charlie's at home; Amita drove him." Don looked at her skeptically, sensing there was something more, then circled question 2, handed back her notepad. There were two people in the world he trusted to tell him the truth, always, even when a lie would be kinder. Charlie wouldn't lie because he was just incapable of it—he physically seemed to reject falsehood; his body language gave him away every time. Terry, on the other hand, could lie but never did; she thought people should make decisions based on truth, so they could fully understand the consequences.

It took her a while to write out an answer to his question. That meant it was bad news: simple questions with complicated answers always were. While she wrote, Don thought about honesty being the best policy. Terry's was a noble attitude, although not one that he could ever quite endorse. There had been problems with Kim long before he'd moved to California; no, he didn't miss Fugitive Recovery at all; really, Charlie, Mom didn't suffer much at all in the end. Yup, Don thought disgustedly, among my many other dubious talents is the fact that I can lie like a rug.

When Terry finally handed him back the notebook, she'd filled seven pages. She'd explained who Anthony Padgett was, how he'd been foisted off on Charlie because none of the other professors wanted to deal with his outbursts and temper tantrums. How the boy had been on medication for schizophrenia praecox but had gone off his meds, worried that they blurred his thinking. After two weeks clean, he'd actually become nervous about his un-medicated behavior; he'd felt himself slipping into madness and had promptly gone back on his medication, taking more than a standard dose in a naïve attempt to make up for things. When in custody, Anthony had explained all of this and the doctors had concurred: it was the extra medication that had prompted his attack on Charlie, whom he'd been watching for weeks. Don remembered that his brother had gotten hang-up calls on his cellphone; he recalled hearing someone slam the front door while he and Charlie were both in the kitchen. They would never know how much of that was actually Anthony, of course, because the student had no clear recollection of even coming to the house. Charlie had been able to explain the latter half of the attack and there was Don's head injury to account for the first half, but there were gaps in the narrative. "What happened to your left hand?" Terry had written at this part in her account; Don wished he could answer that.

The last three pages were Terry's condensation of various medical reports. Meticulous in all of her paperwork, she had unthinkingly placed them in alphabetical order: Alan, Charlie, Don. When he got to that section, Don stopped reading and dropped back into his pillows. Terry had grabbed his hand and been so alarmed by the rapid pulse hammering beneath his clammy skin that she'd regretted not taking Dr. Powell's pager number.

"I didn't know about Dad," Don had said, quietly. Somehow, not being able to actually hear himself made it easier to talk. Terry reached for the notebook, but he held onto it. She would write something sympathetic and gentle and absolutely true, and he didn't want to hear it. Read it. Whatever. Nothing would erase the fact that he had totally forgotten that his father had been injured, and badly. "I mean, I knew. I had to know, I was there, but…I forgot? How did I forget that, Terry?" He answered before she did. "I was worried about Charlie. I'm always worried about Charlie, ever since he started working with us on that rape case. When he's working on something, he forgets to look both ways before crossing the damn street, so I just kept waiting, you know, waiting for something to happen to him. Something related to one of our cases and to his own genius carelessness. I didn't even see this one coming, Terr, didn't even see it."

Don looked at her for an answer, bewildered by his failure. Joining the FBI had seemed the most logical career move in the world: some people might think it was a jump from minor league ball, but to Don it had seemed like the natural continuation of a life spent looking out for others. But looking out for your parents—that still seemed wrong, a looking-glass world inversion of things. Having to stand by and watch his mother get sicker and sicker had rattled Don more than he'd thought possible. He'd kept himself from falling apart only by constantly reminding himself that he wasn't a doctor, wasn't an expert, couldn't do any more than what he was doing. It was a cold comfort, and it didn't help him now. This time he had been the expert.

Terry was still trying to decide what to say when a nurse came in and counting tablets into a small paper cup.

"These should help the middle ear swelling," he explained, "You should see results in about an hour or so." Terry immediately reached for her notebook to write this down for Don.

Her partner just waved her away; he was already trying to pretend everything was fine. My God, was he trying to impress the _nurse_? Someday, Terry knew, the 'strong for others' act that did so much to reassure witnesses and clients was going to backfire. Her psychology training assured her that it would be sooner rather than later, but what could she say? She gathered up her notebook and stepped out into the hallway to give the nurse some room. She and Don no longer had the kind of relationship that brooked suggestions about his behavior. Too much had changed in ten years.


	23. quick study

Charlie could see Don through the window in the door: Don sitting on a hospital bench outside their father's room, sliced up into tiny bits by the wire grid reinforcing the glass. The doctors had shaved a tiny patch around the stitches over Don's left ear, which just made the rest of his hair stick up like duck fluff. It was a family joke that no regulation haircut known to the US government could really make Don's hair lay flat. Obviously the hospital hadn't done much to improve the basic model.

Charlie had wanted to come to the hospital the night before, as soon as he'd gotten Terry's call saying that Don was awake, but Terry had convinced him to wait.

"Come tomorrow," she'd said, "Your father will be able to have visitors then; you and Don can go see him together."

"Are you sure? Amita just left, but I could catch a taxi…" Hospitals were bad, but sitting at home thinking about what was going on at the hospital was even worse. "I mean, we'd still go see Dad tomorrow, but I could just, uh, be there tonight. Put Don on and I'll ask him."

Terry had said that Don was busy with a doctor right then, something about medicine to prevent swelling, but she'd relay the message. Charlie got the feeling that she was trying to keep him from talking to Don without actually saying as much. It was a strange feeling, both because Terry was pretty straight with people and because, Charlie knew, he didn't often have that kind of insight into people: he couldn't always tell when they were hiding things from him.

"So it would be better if I didn't come tonight?" He asked, trusting that Terry would give him an honest answer even if she wouldn't tell him why.

"Yes." Terry said unambiguously. "Tomorrow would be better."

"Okay, then. Tomorrow it is. Only…" Charlie had hesitated, then, not quite sure if he should be discussing his brother with Terry, never quite clear on what their relationship was. "Don—you know, Don, he doesn't sleep much and it gets…I don't know, weird in hospitals at night."

That had sounded stupid even to his own ears, but Terry had understood what he was saying. "Don't worry, I brought a book to keep him from getting bored. It's actually a book he gave _me_ once—the political biography of Adlai Stevenson—and it has never once failed to put me to sleep."

Charlie was going to find that book and buy a copy: Don did look genuinely rested for the first time in longer than Charlie liked to think about. He'd gotten so used to his brother's haggard look that he'd forgotten how good he looked normally. Charlie edged through the door, closing it gently behind him. "Hi," he said quietly. He had the confused idea that he might hurt Don if he talked too loudly or got too close.

Don had no such worries. In two steps, he'd crossed the hallway and pulled Charlie into a hug that nearly took him off his feet. For a minute, Charlie was too surprised to react. Their mother had been the tactile one in the family and since her death, the Eppes men had been getting by with handshakes and pats on the back. He finally managed to free one arm for an awkward half hug of his own.

"Uhh, Don, my arm is..."

"Oh! Sorry!" Don jumps back immediately and Charlie is suddenly aware of the hospital's meat-locker air conditioning. They just stand there for a minute, three feet apart in the sterile corridor, looking at each other. Charlie is sorry he said anything.

"Come on, talk to me," Don says at last, guiding Charlie into a room opposite their father's. It was a consultation room of some sort, not outfitted for a patient. A table and matching chairs in the middle, a window looking out over the parking lot, an arm chair, an endtable with back issues of bland magazines.

Don sits down at the table, hoping that Charlie will follow his lead, but instead Charlie stands next to him, peering at the stitches in his head.

"Look, Charlie…" Don begins, turning to face his brother. Impassively, Charlie pushes Don's head back into profile, gently running his fingers over the healing scars.

"Charlie? This is weird, Charlie—you know that, right?" Don doesn't protest too much, though. It's strangely soothing, even with the edge of Charlie's bandages tickling his ear.

Finally, Charlie steps back. "I just wanted to…uh, make sure." He doesn't specify what he was worried about, just gives Don a sheepish smile: "it was a little weird, huh?"

There's at least a minute of silence and then they both start talking at once.

"Sorry, go ahead."

"No, you first. What did you want to say?"

Charlie is obviously not going to start, so Don takes a deep breath.

"This is not your fault." He lets it settle into the room and then repeats it.

"Okay." Charlie doesn't sit at the table, he kind of collapses into the arm chair, propping his sneakered feet up on the endtable so that his injured arm is cradled in his lap. He looks out the window.

"Charlie!" Don wants to shake him. Hard. But he resolves to stay patient. "Don't take this the wrong way, buddy, but emotions for you are…they're like gravitational forces for me. I know they exist, I kind of understand how they work, but anything beyond the basics and I need to ask a professional. When it comes to people getting hurt, I am the professional here and I'm telling you: don't feel guilty about what happened."

"What makes you the expert?" Charlie asks. Don turns to look at him. He's not being challenging or obnoxious; this is the same tone of voice he used when asking whether Don dealt with jumpers. He's just genuinely curious. Don, having been to college, has a pretty good idea of what Charlie does every day. But Charlie, who doesn't even watch much TV, is just beginning to wrap his mind around Don's life. Charlie's a quick study and the fact that one day soon he'll really grasp what his older brother does for a living—well, that keeps Don up at nights, pacing in his tiny apartment.

"Charlie, I don't want to talk about it. I just want you to know this is not your fault."

"Of course it's not my fault," Charlie says, exasperated. "If anyone's going to feel guilty about this, it's you, not me."


	24. old, old themes

"_I _should feel guilty!" Don demands, "Why should I feel guilty?"

"Didn't say you should," Charlie grumbles to the window, "said you _would_."

"Why would I, then?"

Charlie didn't like the way Don was watching him. Usually Don focuses on a spot just above the person he was talking to, so that he appears to be looking at them but isn't. It was an interrogation trick that he'd brought with him from Albuquerque: a means of listening to the substance of a statement without being distracted by the speaker's expression. Today, though, Don had been watching Charlie like a hawk, angling to see his face when he talked, turning to watch him like a lip-reader. And Charlie, watched by students in class, by colleagues at conferences, by gawkers his whole life (_that's the genius kid; he can do, like, really hard math totally in his head_) didn't know why his brother's scrutiny was making him so jittery.

"I may or may not know much about guilt," Charlie begins slowly, "but I know a fair amount about you. And I know you're going to blame yourself. Because—" Charlie bounces out of his chair and starts walking the length of the narrow room, unable to sit still under Don's stare, "because you think you should have seen it coming, or acted more quickly on what you did see. Because you think there was a really solid pattern, with clear thoughts and motives, and that you missed it. Because that's what you're used to seeing, or finding, or creating. But there's no pattern." Charlie comes to a sudden stop, bracing himself to keep from crashing into the window, talking to his reflection. He'd been moving pretty fast and the _whomp_ of his hands against the window frame makes Don jump.

"This is how crimes look to regular people, Don. People without access to FBI data and police files and Interpol networks. They look sudden and senseless because that's what they are. They come out of the blue and _they_ _change_ _everything_. To most people, their husband being shot in a robbery, their pension getting embezzled, their neighbor being attacked—that's not a data point in a larger scheme, that's a god-damn tragedy and there's not a thing in the world you can do about that."

"Hey!" Don says, loudly; Charlie cursing is enough to shake him out of his shock, but then Don realizes he had nothing else to say. He'd opened his mouth to tell Charlie that patterns helped find criminals, patterns helped identify and protect potential victims. But the thought that _he _would have to sell _Charlie _on the value of mathematics in law enforcement make him shut up.

"If I'm the one feeling guilty," Don asks finally, for lack of anything better to say, "then what are you?"

Charlie hunches his shoulders; now he's the one uncomfortable with the topic at hand. "Betrayed," he says at last, "I'm the one betrayed."

Whatever Don had been expected, it wasn't this. He can't even remember the warm, confident speech he'd planned to help Charlie come to grips with the attack. It was a good speech, too; he'd offered it to a lot of colleagues and a few victims. Not that I lump them together, Don tells himself; it's just that, in his line of work, there are so _many_ of them. If he had to create new, heart-felt things to say to each of them, he'd run out of words completely. Was it possible that he'd made their tragedies routine? Probably. Certainly. Of course. As an FBI agent, you become inured: no one can tolerate being devastated all over again by each new variation on the old, old themes of jealousy and deception. None of that was any help to Charlie, attacked in his own home by one of his own students after thirty years of being wanted, even celebrated, wherever he went.

Don unbuttons his cuffs and starts methodically rolling up his sleeves. He does this, unconsciously, to buy time and calm his buzzing thoughts; it's the last of the nervous habits Terry had warned him against years ago. Some days are so hectic that he arrives at the office with his sleeves already rolled up beneath his jacket, just from driving through LA morning traffic. He'd come to accept that days like that were doomed from the start.

"Charlie?" he says quietly to the figure at the window. His brother doesn't move, just stands seething and rigid, his shoulders locked like he expects to be hit from behind. Don turns away. It's easier to talk at the blank white wall. "People…people hurt each other, Charlie. Maybe we have to; maybe it's just part of living together on the same little planet. Sometimes we mean it, and sometimes we probably deserve it, but, you're right, a lot of times we don't. We both know that." Don thinks about how helpless he'd felt when Dr. Powell and Terry had been discussing his deafness without him. How frightened and how furious he'd been, at that pompous doctor, at Charlie, who wasn't even there. And that had only been temporary; how would it feel to be told that your life-changing tragedy was only a symptom of something larger? That your pain was significant as part of a pattern, but not meaningful in itself?

"I can't do it, Charlie. I can't see each case the way a victim would see it. I can't even see things the way a perpetrator might, even after Terry did that CD thing. And I don't want to. Even if there isn't a cure, buddy, I've got to keep looking for one, and that means looking at the big picture, with each hurt and every crime as part of a pattern that can be found and broken. Otherwise, I…my heart would just explode, Charlie. I'd never get out of bed in the morning."

Actually, Don feels like his _head_ is going to explode. The nurse had warned him about getting worked up, but he'd promised to be careful if she'd just let him up and about. Now he had a headache that makes him wonder if some kind of surgical instrument had been left in the suture by accident. God, he thinks, I'm going to be sick. Dizzy, he lays his head down gently on the cool tabletop.

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	25. a choice of paths

Before Don even registers his brother's motion, he feels the weight of Charlie's hand settle on his head. For all his spastic tendencies, Charlie could move like a cat when he wanted to.

Their mother used to do this. Long after Don had outgrown bedtime stories and lullabies, he would occasionally wake up in the night to find his mother in the chair by his bed. Her hand would be resting gently on his head as though shielding whatever his blankets didn't cover. Sometimes Dad, but Mom more often than not. Don had always pretended to be asleep, laying there quietly under her protection until pretending became real and sleep pulled him down like an undertow. For the first time, he realizes that Mom must have done the same thing with Charlie, although Don had always been the more restless sleeper. It usually took Charlie a while to wind down, but when he did, he was gone completely, like a light, like a played-out toddler. Maybe she and Dad had split the job. Dan imagined his parents sitting alone in the separate rooms of the sleeping house, linked by the dark hallway that ran between their sons' bedrooms.

Don raises his head and smiles at Charlie. "Look at us," he says with a rueful glance that takes in Charlie's arm and his own bandaged reflection, "We're a mess."

Charlie chuckles. "We have seen better days, that's for sure."

"How did this even _start_?"

Charlie ran his good hand over his face. "Oh, God, I don't know, " he says wearily, "What does it matter?"

It matters a lot, Don knows. Charlie really does feel betrayed, and who's to say those feelings aren't right? It would take a good long time for him to come to grips with that, with the fact that even his own little math world wasn't as safe as he'd believed it to be. As for Don, maybe it was time to take down some of the protective barriers he'd built while doing Fugitive Recovery. If Charlie had to get used to the fact that not everyone meant him well, then Don had to get used to the idea that a lot of times 'meant' didn't enter into it. Some crimes were pre-meditated and cold-blooded, but sometimes they weren't. If Don kept thinking about crimes as events he'd failed to prevent, malice he'd failed to see, he'd find himself living in a very lonely black-and-white world.

"Let's go see Dad," Don says at last, "We can talk about this another time." Both of them need a little break, now, and Don is pretty sure that everything will seem saner after talking with Alan. His father just has a way of reminding him that everything works out, eventually. Don stands up—slowly, so as not to get dizzy—and makes his way over to the door. He's already opened it before he realizes that Charlie isn't following.

"Hey, Charlie? Wanna go check on Dad?"

Charlie stays seated at the table. As far as he iss concerned, the conversation isn't over yet. "You know when you asked me about hearing voices, and I got mad at you?"

"Yeah," Don answers automatically. Wow, when was that? It feels like a million years ago, but it was really only, what--two or three days? Has Charlie been worried about that? Has he been manufacturing one of his epic apologies ever since? "Yeah, Charlie, I remember that. Look, you don't have to apologize, I started it and— "

"Well, you were right. About the voices." Charlie says in one tight breath, "I do hear them, sometimes."

"What?" Don tries to say, but his mouth has suddenly gone so dry that he doesn't think the word actually came out.

"I--sometimes, just when things get, you know...stressful. It's like I have you or Dad--sometimes even Larry--in my head, telling me what to do. It used to be Mom, a lot, but...not so much any more."

Don slumps against the wall, trying to wrap his head around this. Is this what he thinks it is, or is he about to monumentally underestimate things—again? "Charlie? Can you, uh, give me an example? Like, a time when this happened?"

His brother won't look at him; Charlie keeps his chin tucked into his chest and speaks to the tabletop. He starts drumming his fingers. "I got into an argument with Amita the other day," he begins slowly, "and I yelled at her."

"With Amita?" Don doesn't know why he latched onto this, what with everything else going on. Maybe because Charlie is usually scrupulously polite to his graduate assistants. Sure, he snapped at them when they interrupted his work, but they knew not to take that personally: Charlie got annoyed at any non-numeric form that wandered into his field of vision when he was thinking about a problem. To make up for it, though, he was doubly appreciative of their help at all other times. If he'd really let Amita get under his skin--well, that made her more than the average advisee. Which Don found didn't surprise him in the least.

"Yeah. I--well, it's not important, suffice to say she was trying to get me to talk and I was trying to scare her away. But then, right before I said…uhm, something that would have hurt her feelings, it was like Dad was there. I could practically hear him." Charlie takes a deep breath. "He took me to a lecture once—this was years ago—and during the question and answer period I got a little...demanding. I mean, the data was clearly wrong," some indignancy creeps into his voice, even years after the fact, "but I guess I didn't have to get so intense about it. Anyway, Dad hauled me out of there and in the car on the way back, he said 'Charlie, for some people it will always be easier to be smart than to be kind.' That's all he said, and he never mentioned it again, but that's what I thought of the other day."

Charlie sighs again. " I should have said something when you asked, but I didn't want you to think I was--" his voice catches on the 'c' in crazy.

"Oh, Charlie." Don is relieved, but at the same time sadder than he can say. His brother really knows so little about how much he had in common with other people. Charlie has gotten into the habit of being the anomaly in any group. He just assumes he processes things differently, and most of the time he does. But not this time.

"Charlie, that happens to me all the time. It happens to everyone."

"Really?" Charlie swivels around in his chair.

"Really. So if that makes you crazy, I guess I'm crazy, too." Don smiles. "Every time I write a report at work, it's like I can hear you reminding me not to get too detailed too quickly. I like to think of it as the voice of my better nature. And if you think you've got it tough, try having Terry stuck in your head."

Charlie closes his eyes and visibly relaxes. Until it dissipated, Don hadn't been aware of the tension that surrounded his brother like an electrical field.

"Did you think you were going crazy?" Don asks gently. Charlie nods.

"Charlie--you've--you gotta start telling us these things, instead of just thinking them and bottling them up. If you'd said something, I could have told you this days ago." Don reins himself in; he could save the lecture for another time. If the situation had been reversed, he would have done the same thing. Maybe that was something else for him to work on; maybe something he and Charlie should work on together. "So," Don says lightly, "ready to go see Dad? I bet he'd be glad to hear about your argument with Amita." Suddenly realizing how that sounded, he stammers, "I mean, not the argument, per se, but the thing..."

"Yeah," Charlie smiles, seeing right through Don's confusion, as he usually does, "I know exactly what you mean."

the end

* * *

Endquote: "Quantum physics describes 'twinned particles,' photons of energy that, even though separated by miles, behave identically when confronted with a choice of paths. It is now thought that some unseen connection binds them, defying known physical laws, acting instantaneously without reference to the speed of light or any other limit." (Greg Iles).

* * *

A/N: thanks to everyone who actually read through the whole story and encouraged me to keep posting. I know it could go on longer—so could I!—but this seemed like a natural breaking point. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed all of your comments. The following things are true, more or less: ice-cream rape theorem, law enforcement 'voices' on CD, the acoustic processes of the inner ear, the 'sad' sound of the earth, the Vienna Circle. Edited for grammar and to say: just for the record, I was talking about twinned particles long before Larry came up with quantum entanglements! 


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